The Colorado Avalanche feel worse than they actually are - DNVR ...

After tonight’s 4-1 loss to the Edmonton Oilers, the Colorado Avalanche finished up the dreaded three-games-in-four-nights stretch 1-2. Their only win came in the tightest of shootouts against the Vegas Golden Knights.

That win somehow feels like a fever dream at this point because it was sandwiched between an embarrassing 8-2 loss in Tampa Bay and the back-to-back double whammy they just got against Dallas and Edmonton.

They go to sleep tonight out of the playoffs and with 25 games played, they don’t have any games in hand on anybody around them. They are 13-12 and have a -12 goal differential. Nathan MacKinnon has zero goals in 10 games and just three points in his last eight games (none tonight). The injuries won’t stop piling up.

Is this The Bad Place?

The Avalanche are still fine

13-12 after 25 games isn’t a big deal. It’s not ideal, obviously, because they’re out of the playoffs right now, but seasons aren’t 25 games long. They’re 82. Do I trust the Avs to be three points better over the next 57 games than the Calgary Flames? I do.

The goal differential is almost comically deceiving. The Avs are -12. They have allowed 12 empty-net goals. During MacKinnon’s 10-game goalless stretch, the Avs are 6-4. That record drops to 4-4 during this stretch where he has just three points in eight games, but even that record surprised me when I went back and looked.

It feels worse than it is because they’ve lost three of four. It feels worse than it is because Jonathan Drouin (week-to-week), Josh Manson (week-to-week), Miles Wood (month-to-month), and Oliver Kylington (day-to-day) all got hurt and Ross Colton remains out as he recovers from a broken foot.

That’s three members of your forward corps and at least one mainstay on your defense, though Kylington’s play had ticked up enough to make you wonder if he was taking a job from Calvin de Haan.

On top of all of that, I went and checked Hockey Reference’s strength of schedule metric. The Avs have had the third-hardest schedule in the NHL so far and the hardest schedule of any team in the Western Conference.

All of that with constant injury issues and historically poor goaltending, though that has stabilized a bit as they have only had four sub-.900 save percentages as a team in the last 10 games.

Things are okay right now. They’re challenging. The Avs are in a grind.

They are in the hockey team equivalent of a Tuesday morning where you’ve only been at work for an hour and the caffeine isn’t quite hitting hard enough and you’ve got big plans this weekend that you’re excited about and that’s the real focus but you have to get through the week to get where you really want to be.

Reasons to remain optimistic about the Avs

On a per-60 basis at 5v5, the Avs are third in shot attempts, 11th in shots on goal, third in scoring chances, and eighth in high-danger chances. Offensively, they are putting the pucks in dangerous areas.

If the Avs can stay even a little healthy at the top of the forward corps, they are playing the game the right way offensively.

Defensively, there are similar reasons to feel positive about what the Avs have done.

Again, on a per-60 basis at 5v5, Colorado is sixth in shot attempts allowed, second in shots on goal allowed, and fifth in scoring chances allowed. They do a good job of keeping the volume of chances against minimized. They give their goaltenders a mostly sound environment to work in.

They have superstars in MacKinnon, Makar, and Rantanen. They have skilled two-way players who make life miserable in Artturi Lehkonen and Val Nichushkin. Casey Mittelstadt had a tough November but is a real 2C behind MacKinnon.

There’s lots to like here.

Reasons to bring that hater energy

The Avs are very much a work in progress. Their special teams continue to be inconsistent as the power play has gone dry, the penalty kill is bleeding goals, and their 5v5 play remains inconsistent.

It’s not all rosy, however. We all know the goaltending, on the whole, has been brutally bad. That’s just a fact.

While the environment is mostly sound, there is one area defensively the Avs have struggled. They are 21st in high-danger chances allowed per-60 at 5v5. It’s not the volume, but the quality.

Somehow, the Avs are better on the penalty kill at preventing high-danger chances than they are at 5v5, but only a little bit as they are 15th in that area.

Colorado’s three superstars sometimes appear worn down from years of overwork by head coach Jared Bednar, who might have sacrificed his star’s ability to compete late in tonight’s game against Edmonton as he chased an unlikely comeback in Dallas last night on the front end of a back-to-back.

Salary cap problems have hamstrung the team and their ability to make meaningful additions in depth roles is even more limited because of the constant uncertainty of Gabe Landeskog and his $7M price tag that hangs over the organization.

Doing right by their longtime captain might now be doing a disservice to the stars who are still pulling the sweater on every day and the lack of a clear voice at the top of the leadership food chain has helped foster a host of bad habits by the Avs’ stars who were kept in line by Landeskog, a player and person dedicated to putting the work in the right way. Shortcuts have been allowed, so shortcuts are taken.

Also, injuries in general.

There are no clear paths forward with Rantanen heading to an extremely expensive new contract and free agency and no starting goaltender signed beyond this season so even the future feels murky.

Does that about sum it up?

Things are still okay. For now.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum above, the Avs are still hanging tough. They have a lot of work to do, but they also have over half of the season remaining to do that work.

For me, why this feels so uneven right now is that there is no certainty basically anywhere you look. Colorado should be great and in a lot of ways, their play is revealing a team bursting at the seams with potential.

The reality feels so bad because it feels like it has always been something since the team won the Stanley Cup. Landeskog’s injuries, everyone else’s injuries, Nichushkin’s multiple postseasons cut short, salary cap problems, uneven goaltending.

Anecdotally, it has felt like ever since the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup, the organization has stacked problem on top of problem without ever solving any along the way. It has been exhausting.

I don’t know about y’all, but I felt the exhaustion hardest in the third period of tonight’s loss to the Oilers.