Twenty-Nine Shots. Zero Goals. Colorado's Right Wing Problem Has a Name Now.

The number that keeps pulling me back isn't the one on the banner. It's 29. Twenty-nine shots on goal from the right wing position over Colorado's last ten games, and not a single one found the net. That's not a slump. A slump ends. This is a position that has been functionally removed from the Avalanche's offensive architecture, and they are heading into the playoffs pretending otherwise.

I've spent two pieces this month making the case that Colorado's depth problem is real and structural — that the top seed flatters a roster held upright by Nathan MacKinnon's 83 points, Cale Makar's blue-line command, and a defense that has surrendered just 1.7 goals per game over the last ten contests. The defense has been extraordinary. But defense doesn't score, and right now, neither does right wing. Logan O'Connor, listed as the starter at that position, is producing at zero percent of what a league-starting right wing should generate. The depth chart behind him — T.J. Hughes and Fabian Lysell — has absorbed minutes without solving the problem. Twenty-nine shots, zero goals, ten games. The math doesn't care about sample-size caveats at this point.

What makes this genuinely alarming rather than merely frustrating is the context around it. Colorado's offense has contracted to 2.7 goals per game over the last ten, down nearly a full goal from the 3.6 they were producing in the prior stretch. MacKinnon is doing everything — averaging 1.73 points per game, a pace that would be historic in any era — and Martin Necas at 61 points has been a legitimate secondary engine. But when the right wing is a black hole, opposing penalty kills and defensive pairings can cheat toward MacKinnon and Necas without consequence. The positional void isn't just failing to produce; it's compressing the space everyone else has to work in.

The one-goal record is where this all converges into something genuinely dangerous. Colorado is 14–16 in one-goal games — a 47% win rate in contests decided by a single goal. Playoff hockey, almost by definition, is one-goal hockey. The series-deciding games, the overtime moments, the third-period grinds where a secondary scorer buries a rebound or converts a cycle goal — those are the moments that separate contenders from champions. The Avalanche are losing those moments at a rate that should worry anyone who watched their November and December dominance and assumed this team had solved the depth equation. It hadn't. It had just been outscoring the problem.

The injury cascade that hit in late September — L'Heureux, O'Connor, Merkulov, and Taylor Makar all going down within days of each other — opened the wound. The roster has since stabilized, with no new injuries reported in the last three weeks, but stabilization isn't the same as recovery. The right wing hole predates the cascade and has outlasted it. Jared Bednar has managed this situation as well as anyone could reasonably expect; his defensive structure has kept Colorado from hemorrhaging games it should win. But there is a limit to what structure can compensate for, and that limit is exactly what a playoff opponent will probe in every game seven situation this team faces. My read is that unless something changes at right wing before the first round begins, the Avalanche's ceiling is determined not by how good MacKinnon is, but by how long a playoff series can go before the depth void decides it.