Colorado's Nathan MacKinnon looks on as members of the Vegas Golden Knights celebrate Brett Howden's empty net goal in their Game 3 comeback win. The win gave Vegas a 3-0 advantage in the Western Conference final.Mark J. Terrill/The Associated Press
In February, the Colorado Avalanche sent eight of their players to the Olympics. Four of them – arguably, their four best – made the gold-medal game, which meant they were working the whole break.
One of them, Brock Nelson, a member of the winning USA team, decided to skip the MAGA-inflected victory tour and headed straight back to the team. At the time, people guessed he was making a (very quiet) anti-Trump statement. Maybe Nelson just really needed physical therapy. Watching him out there now, that’s what it looks like.
The Avalanche were far and away the best team in the NHL this season, when it didn’t matter. Now that it does, they look like a team of old-timers, and not a very good one. Everyone appears to be nursing the sort of injury that would send a baseball player to the IR for half a season.
On Sunday, this culminated in the sort of humiliation that can turn a franchise in the ascendance into one in disarray. After dropping the first two games at home, Colorado went to Las Vegas and scored three unanswered in the first. Game over. We have a series.
Except the Golden Knights reeled them in. The third period was one of the most miserable you’ve ever seen. You half expected Avalanche coach Jared Bednar to start swinging his handkerchief over his head. It ended 5-3 for Vegas, who now lead the series 3-0.
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“It’s a big hill to climb,” Bednar said afterward. “You’ve got to find a way to get over it.”
Interesting choice of the word ‘you’. Everyone connected to this disaster has already started backing away from it.
Obviously, something is to blame here, and it isn’t just injuries. Even the guys who aren’t hurt look lost. Ten klicks short of their destination, the Avalanche have run out of gas.
The Olympics isn’t an excuse. Vegas sent just as many people to Milan. However, it is an explanation. If you want to win a Stanley Cup in the modern NHL you need one of two things – luck in your timing, or two rosters in one.
The Vegas Golden Knights mascot Chance the Golden Gila Monster soaks in the Game 3 comeback win on Sunday.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Top soccer teams have been doing the second thing for years. Their season starts in August and between the league, the cups and international tournaments, it never really stops. The clubs who can afford to do so buy two starters for every position and either rotate them, or sub one in when the other is hurt.
If the NHL has a business idol, it’s soccer. Hockey recognizes that its core market – Canada and a few colder pockets of the U.S. – isn’t big enough. It needs Europe and as much of Asia as it can grab. You may have noticed the NHL in recent years, swanning around overseas, pretending to have an accent.
That’s why the league’s back at the Olympics. That’s why the 4 Nations was created. That’s why the smarter ones suddenly care about the world championships. There’s a whole world out there to sell to, but first, they have to know who you are.
That’s all great. And what about the National Hockey League? The league and its franchises are choosing to forget about that part.
Football is so onerous that its league had to get down in the dirt with its own players in order expand from 16 to 18 games. You think hockey’s much easier on the body? Granted, the guy running into you doesn’t weigh 350 pounds, but in football, he isn’t aerodynamically optimized to fly like a missile.
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Between pre, regular and postseason, a fully functional NFL player might play 22, 23 games in a calendar year. Might. A hockey star in an Olympic year is expected to be ready to play 120. Next year, the NHL will add two additional regular season games.
Is this a problem? No. These guys aren’t paid all that money for their talent. They are paid so much in order to surrender their vitality and, in many cases, their longevity.
If the players don’t want to play so much, they can change that by refusing to do so as a collective bargaining unit. But that would cost them a work stoppage and a whole lot of money, which they’d rather not do. So they’ll keep running it out there until they break, then blame the league for breaking them. Fewer games is a non-starter.
The other problem is money. The players draw salary from a negotiated pool, and want as much of it for themselves as possible. The wiser thing would be to reduce individual salaries overall while expanding rosters. Bigger rosters mean more rest for the top guys in games that don’t matter as much (i.e. the regular season). Why not have five or six lines, as opposed to four? You can reduce them again in the postseason. This would provide cover if you find yourself in Colorado’s position, with too few fully fit men to run out a healthy roster.
Expanded rosters would allow teams to preserve their players for NHL seasons that are getting increasingly longer, Cathal Kelly writes.Mark J. Terrill/The Associated Press
But that would mean that a US$12-million player is now an US$8-million player, which is not on. So more hands at the tiller is not a solution.
Which means there’s only one fix – manage the insufficient manpower you do have so that it’s not being wasted on shifts that don’t matter. The lesson other teams will draw from the Avalanche collapse is that any effort put into the regular season is wasted. The same regular season that is being expanded.
Vegas spent most of the year puttering around the playoff cutoff line. They fired their coach in March. Does this sound like a team that prioritized home-ice advantage? No. Does it sound like a team that had a plan? Also no. The Knights took the lucky route, and so far, it’s working out for them.
In Montreal and Carolina, it’s variations on the same story. One was too young to send many people to the Olympics, and the other too starless. Both teams managed their energy expenditure – though I doubt they thought of it that way – and have something left to give now.
Nobody will learn this harder than the Avalanche. In the space of a week, they’ve gone from the smartest team in hockey to the stupidest.
Here’s a guess that if someone in the international set-up for Canada, the USA or Sweden tries reaching out to any Colorado players next year, they’re going to wait a long time for a text back.