The Colorado Avalanche season has been falling apart for some time now. They have the worst record in the NHL, are on track to be one of the worst teams the league has seen in recent memory, their starting goalie is undergoing season ending surgery, and following their 3-2 loss to the Vancouver Canucks on Wednesday have now lost 24 of their past 28 games.
That failure on the ice has once again fired up the trade rumor machine surrounding some of their top players, specifically forwards Matt Duchene and Gabriel Landeskog.
On Wednesday, Duchene was asked about the potential of a trade and told Mark Kiszla of the Denver Post that he is “open to it” if something happens. Not necessarily because he is hoping for one or asking for one, but just because he knows that is how the business works.
“When I say open to it, I know it’s part of the business, and it’s something that might happen,” said Duchene. “I’m not hiding from it. I’m not running away. I’m not banging my head. I understand it’s part of what we deal with as pro athletes.”
Given the continued regression of the Avalanche organization over the past three years their core players have been the targets of criticism and the focal point of a lot of the team’s struggles because, well, that’s how hockey works. When a team is bad or underachieves the guys at the top take the majority of the blame and can sometimes be the first ones sent out the door when it comes time to clean house.
A couple of weeks ago general manager Joe Sakic said the only players that he would not really consider trading at this point are 2013 No. 1 overall pick Nathan MacKinnon and recent first-round selections Mikko Rantanen and Tyson Jost.
Other than that, everybody would seem to be on the table if the right move came along.
Even though Duchene, 26, is having a bit of a down year offensively (at least compared to what he has done in recent years) he is still the team’s leading goal-scorer with 15 and second-leading point producer with 29 points in 41 games (a 58-point pace over 82 games). He is also still a legitimate top-line player in the NHL and signed for two more years at a very reasonable salary cap hit of $6 million per year. There is a ton of value in that play, and it would be laughably unfair to make a player like him the scapegoat for the flawed construction of the roster, especially when it comes to their forward depth behind their top players and the miserable state of the defense.
Trading a player like that is a massive deal and is one you absolutely have to get right. That brings us back to a question I posed a couple of weeks ago when it comes to the Avalanche and a trade involving one of their core players: Do you trust the people that built a team that has only won 13 out of its first 46 games this season to successfully pull off that sort of potentially franchise-altering trade?