On June 9, 2001, the Colorado Avalanche is the world’s best ice hockey team. Peter Forsberg has been forced to cancel the playoffs after an injury, but after Alex Tanguay scored two goals in the seventh decisive final against the New Jersey Devils at home, the victory is clear.
Team captain Joe Sakic gets the dent but does not lift it, instead handing it over to Ray Bourque – who played 22 seasons without reaching all the way forward – in one of NHL history’s most classic moments.
The star-studded team almost reaches the final the following year, and is a top candidate in the following years but does not return to the final. After the 2007-2008 season, it will be almost pitch dark in the hockey city of Denver.
The Colorado Avalanche misses the playoffs seven of the following nine seasons and the glory days are long gone. The stars are missing and the bottom positions are stacked high.
But to become a good team in the NHL, you often have to be bad first. The Colorado Avalanche was bad enough, long enough, to be able to start over.
The NHL is a closed league where all teams have private owners and there is a stated goal to keep it as even as possible and to keep costs down. To achieve this, there are mainly two tools. The first is a salary cap, the second is the draft.
The bottom positions allow Colorado to draft future stars such as Swedish Gabriel Landeskog – team captain since 2012 – and the Finnish forward Mikko Rantanen. But they also mean that today’s team contains two Canadian players who are among the world’s absolute best players in their positions.
Since Nathan McKinnon was selected as number one in the draft in 2013, he has developed into one of the league’s best centers with 242 goals on the account.
Even at the other end of the ice, the team is led by a high draft pick. Three teams chose Cale Makar in 2017. Colorado did not make the same mistake and now he has scored 27 points in the playoffs – most of all in the team – and has been named the league’s best defender.
After Makar joined the team, the offensive has become stronger every year and they have gone to the playoffs three of four seasons. Once there, it ended with three straight outings in the quarterfinals and the last pieces of the puzzle seemed to be missing.
But this year they succeeded defeat the ghost. When DN spoke before the final series with the Swedish NHL legend Stefan Persson, who won the Stanley Cup four years in a row in the 1980s, about what would decide, he highlighted two key factors.
– You have to have a good goalkeeper. Having someone who is a little slack is devastating for a team. It is something that is difficult to shake off if you feel that the goalkeeper is not really there.
– Then there’s the game in sudden death. Many people say that it is 50/50 or coincidences that decide, but it is definitely not. Suddenly you have to learn to win and a final series is usually so even that if you win the matches that go to sudden, it is often the difference that decides, Persson explained.
He would turn out to be right and in both cases, Avalanche has been helped by recent acquisitions in recent years. Goalkeeper Darcy Kuemper joined from the Arizona Coyotes this summer and has been stable, more than that has not been required.
With forward André Burakovsky, who joined from Washington Capitals in 2019 after the team won the Stanley Cup, the team got a winning routine and it was the Swede who decided the first final match in overtime.
Leading and ability to decide when it comes to most was also recruited at the last second when the former Frölunda player Artturi Lehkonen joined from Montreal during the winter. The Finnish forward pushed his team to the Stanley Cup final for the second year in a row, when he poked the decision in the semifinals, also in overtime.
When the series against Tampa Bay stood and weighed and even the fourth game went to extra time, another hero stepped forward after Colorado pushed the Florida team down in their own zone almost uninterrupted for just over ten minutes. Nazem Kadri missed last season’s exit in the playoffs, now he was back and pushed up the 3-2 goal in the net.
The two-time reigning champions could not recover from the 1-3 defeat in matches and Avalanche is once again the Stanley Cup winner, after winning five playoff games in overtime, and only losing one.
– It’s about daring to believe in it and drive, Stefan Persson summed up when the title drought was still alive.