This time of year will exhaust even the deepest teams. The NHL is taking a three-week break in February for the Winter Olympics, but they didn't expand the start or end of the regular season. As a result, the schedule is crunched, and you could really see the effect over the holiday weekend, with tired squads playing low-event games. The NHL has long been in an era of relative parity, but the bulk of the teams feel especially interchangeable through the first few months of this season. If you're asked how your local boys are doing, and you don't know, the safest answer is "Oh, they're doing all right." A full 27 of the league's 32 teams currently sit within the range of 25 to 35 points. Truly, anything can happen.
But there is exactly one prediction for April that you can take to the bank: The Colorado Avalanche are not going to miss the playoffs. While nearly everyone else has see-sawed their way to inconclusive contention, the Avs have smothered the field. They've only lost one game in regulation out of 26 so far, winning 19 and showing zero signs of weakness. They're pacing the NHL in both goals scored and goals against, and they've won 12 of their last 13, the lone loss coming in a shootout against Minnesota's sensational rookie goalie Jesper Wallstedt. On Tuesday night against the Canucks, they continued to display all facets of their superiority in a 3-1 win.
Vancouver scored early, and then Colorado soundly outplayed them the rest of the way. The first star was the usual suspect, the team's most consistently jaw-dropping player: Nathan MacKinnon. An extremely aggressive center who shoulders a huge share of the offensive workload every night, MacKinnon is "bouncing back" from a 116-point season where his finishing wasn't quite up to his regular standards. His 22 goals in 26 games imply that he'll blow past last year's tally of 32, and he earned two of them on Kevin Lankinen in this victory.
The first was a rebound into a yawning net, and I thought the second was an especially good example of a leading team not just perfunctorily playing out the last minute of the second period. With the score 2-1, MacKinnon's line turned in a successful defensive shift before moving up the ice with a change in possession. Josh Manson muscled the puck across the blue line, MacKinnon tapped the biscuit away from prying Vancouver sticks in a way he couldn't have done if he'd been a little lazier skating forward, and Gabriel Landeskog scooped it up with time in the corner to pick out a pass. As the Canucks defense both locked eyes with Landy and kept track of another Av streaking to the far post, MacKinnon had plenty of space to receive the one-timer and slam it past Lankinen. The Avalanche went into Intermission II with all the momentum, and nothing shook them up in the final 20 minutes.
Everything is going right for this team. They're pretty healthy, knock on ice. They're getting spectacular goaltending from a random dude in 33-year-old Scott Wedgewood, who's started more than 30 games in a season just once. New top winger Marty Nečas is proving about as productive as the man he replaced in a trade in the middle of last year, Mikko Rantanen. Cale Makar is your reigning Norris winner as the league's most exemplary D-man, and he's aided by veteran depth in that unit, as well as the emergence of a real anchor at the very bottom of the pairings: 27-year-old undrafted third-year Sam Malinski. The return of team captain Landeskog from a multi-year injury absence has gone about as well as anybody could have hoped, while newer additions like Brock Nelson and Victor Olofsson have provided good returns. In all, there's nobody on this roster whom you can say isn't fulfilling his role, and even the Avalanche's least relevant player is a source of delight: his name is Ivan Ivan!
There's one other factor that helps explain why Colorado owns four fewer regulation losses than the next-best team: The Avs are playing pissed. This is a team that's maintained a Stanley Cup level of skill in the years since they won it all in 2022, but their playoffs have fizzled in three straight disappointments. They fell to the flukey Kraken in the first round in their title-defense run. They took care of the Jets the following year but got stumped by the Stars in the second round. And then last spring, maybe most brutal of all, Dallas took them out in a first-round Game 7 after the Avalanche held a 2-0 lead with 13 minutes to play.
The grind of the NHL's regular season doesn't necessarily reward the very best team with the Presidents' Trophy so much as it does a talented team that is most motivated to play hard every single night. With the bitter taste of that Stars series still in their mouths, and perhaps a certain reinvigoration caused by Landeskog's return, the Avs are out to restore the fear that the league felt when they swaggered to the Cup in 2022. I think it's mostly working, but they'll still have to watch out for the league's next most-dominant contender—one that's got 39 points of their own and is just as fired up to capture Stanley after a string of playoff shortfalls. I'll give you a hint: They play in Dallas.
