The future is looking bright in Colorado. Not only have the Avs made several additions to their roster this summer, but they haven’t even reached the salary cap floor of $60 million yet. So how good are they and what’s left for them to accomplish this off-season?
For starters, they won’t be below the cap floor for much longer. They have to sign prized restricted free agent Mikko Rantanen to a new deal that will likely exceed $8 million per season and they also have to give newly acquired forward Andre Burakovsky a new contract, too. Add defenseman Nikita Zadorov to the mix, and you’re looking at adding a total of roughly $16 million in salaries between the three of them.
Even once those players sign, the Avalanche will still have a significant amount of cap space to go out and make even more additions to their roster. As of right now, they have $27.15 million worth of room under the cap, so general manager Joe Sakic should be feeling good about the way things are shaping up.
Sakic will continue to be busy in the next few days and weeks, but he’s already made some key additions via the draft, trades and free agency. They selected defenseman Bowen Byram fourth overall in the NHL Entry Draft, they added Burakovsky and Nazem Kadri by trade, and they signed Joonas Donskoi and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare in free agency.
They lost Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot in the deal for Kadri, but upgrading down the middle isn’t easy to do in the NHL. Those guys rarely become available, so when they do you need to pounce on them.
[ProHockeyTalk’s 2019 NHL free agency tracker]
So, how good are the Avalanche right now?
Well, if we assume Rantanen is coming back, that means that one of the best lines in hockey will remain intact. Rantanen, Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog are a force when they’re together, and the Avs should be confident rolling them out there against anybody in the league.
Kadri will add some scoring touch to the second line and to their power play, and Burakovasky and/or Donskoi could be intriguing fits on that line. They could probably use some of their left over cap space to add one more top six forward via free agency or trade, but the top two lines look solid.
Also, we haven’t seen the best of Tyson Jost just yet either. The 21-year-old 11 goals and 26 points in 70 games last season. Expect him to get more and more comfortable in the NHL as he gains experience. He’s one of the “boom” candidates on Colorado’s roster going into 2019-20.
As for their defense, the Avs have some of the best young defenders in the league on their blue line. We all saw what Cale Makar was able to do in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. He looks like he’ll be a number one defenseman in the near future. Sam Girard is a smaller player that’s perfectly suited for today’s NHL, and they drafted Byram. Now, you can understand why they were so open to trading Barrie to Toronto. They also have veterans like Erik Johnson and Ian Cole that can show these youngsters what it takes to be regular NHLers.
That brings us to their goaltending situation. The Avs went into last season with Semyon Varlamov and Philipp Grubauer as their one-two punch between the pipes. They quickly realized that Grubauer was the superior option, and he didn’t disappoint them. The 27-year-old played well in the playoffs, and it looks like he’ll be the one to lead this team next season. There are plenty of question marks surrounding Grubauer though. Most notably, he hasn’t suited up in more than 37 games during the regular season at any point in his career. Of course, he played 37 last year and 12 more in the playoffs, but how will he respond to potentially playing 50 regular-season games plus the postseason? We simply don’t know.
Overall, the Avs look like a solid team on paper with a good blend of veterans and young players. There’s still some question marks on this roster, but they’ve done a great job of locking in players like MacKinnon and Landeskog to very fair contracts, which has led to them having plenty of cap space to address other needs.
They finished in the final Wild Card spot in the West last year, and it wouldn’t surprise anybody if they managed to leap over any of the three other teams (Nashville, Winnipeg and St. Louis) as soon as next season. Whether or not they’re ready to make an appearance in the Western Conference Final remains to be seen, but they’re not that far off.
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Joey Alfieri is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @joeyalfieri.