The Offseason Acquisitions Were Supposed to Fix This. They Didn't.

Colorado traded away Valeri Nichushkin, signed Jaden Schwartz, added Georgii Merkulov, and entered this season with a credible argument that the right wing problem had been addressed. The argument is now 29 shots and zero goals old. That's what the right wing has produced over the last 10 games — nearly three shots a night, nothing to show for any of them — and the Avalanche are 5-5 in that span with a goal differential that has fallen nearly in half from their season pace. The acquisitions didn't fix the problem. They papered over it long enough for the team to clinch the top seed, and now the paper is coming off.

What makes this particularly difficult to dismiss as a cold streak is the structural nature of the failure. Logan O'Connor, nominally the starter at right wing, has contributed nothing in the production metrics that matter. The depth chart behind him — Fabian Lysell and T.J. Hughes — is getting looks, but the position as a whole has gone silent at the worst imaginable moment. Shots are being generated. The ice time is there. The puck is finding its way to the right places. It just isn't going in, and it hasn't for ten consecutive games. At some point, a cold streak becomes a diagnosis.

The one-goal record is where this connects to something genuinely alarming. Colorado is 14-16 in games decided by a single goal. That's not a rounding error — that's the team losing nearly every close contest across a full season's worth of marginal games. In the regular season, MacKinnon's 83 points and Necas's 61 can bail you out of those deficits often enough to still win 61 games. In a playoff series, where one-goal games are the norm rather than the exception, there is no statistical cushion. The elite core cannot outscore a structural void when the structure itself is what determines outcomes.

I wrote two weeks ago that Colorado's margin for error had vanished with Makar sidelined. The right wing situation compounds that directly. Makar's offensive contributions from the blue line — 55 points in 48 games, including 41 assists — created secondary pressure that masked how little the right side was generating on its own. Without him quarterbacking the power play and driving transition, the forward group is exposed. The right wing isn't just failing to score; it's failing to score in a context where the safety net has been pulled.

My read is that this is the version of Colorado that will enter the playoffs unless something changes in the next few games: a top seed with a generational center, a cold defensive anchor situation, and a right wing that has been outworked by its own shot totals. MacKinnon is good enough to carry a team through a round. He has done it before. But the history of playoff hockey is littered with top seeds who found out that one transcendent player cannot manufacture finishing ability that simply isn't there. The offseason was supposed to solve this. It didn't. The playoffs will not be more forgiving than the regular season about finding out.