What lessons can a Bruins team stuck at crossroads learn from Avalanche’s Cup run?

A rare occurrence took place on the ice at Amalie Arena on Sunday evening. 

In a game like hockey where a 24-21-11 Habs team can punch its ticket to a Stanley Cup Final, it’s not often that you see the best team — on paper at least — hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup in June.

You can chalk that up to the parity in the NHL, the grueling slog of playoff hockey that saps the strength away from even the most stacked teams in the league — or just the chaotic unpredictability that comes with a sporting event where so much hinges on the fortunes of a tumbling puck.

But on Sunday, the Colorado Avalanche — the league’s best team, through and through, for the 2021-22 campaign — dispelled such a narrative en route to their first Stanley Cup title since 2001. 

Simply put, the Avs were a juggernaut this season, stumbling out the gate with a 4-5-1 record in October before casually orchestrating a 68-18-6 run the rest of the way. For all of the talk that the preseason favorites had failed to get over the hump after a few disheartening second-round exits, Colorado went on a warpath this spring — posting a 16-4 record in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Only one team since 1987 has won hockey’s top prize with less than four losses — the 1988 Edmonton Oilers. And the only teams to actually hand the Avs losses during this run were the last two Cup champions, the St. Louis Blues and the Tampa Bay Lightning. 

For Joe Sakic and the Avalanche, Sunday’s coronation was the triumphant conclusion to an extensive rebuild that has seen the organization hit rock bottom in 2012 and 2016 — only to emerge with an uber-skilled core that could add a few more Cups to their resume in the coming years.

And for the rest of the NHL, Colorado’s victory stands as the latest template that will be dissected and analyzed in search of a winning formula toward hockey immortality. 

Of course, it’s an undertaking easier said than done. 

In previous years, when we’ve looked at teams like the Lightning, Canadiens, Stars, Blues and other teams that have punched their ticket to the Stanley Cup Final, we picked up on a number of commonalities — a slew of secondary-scoring contributions, a beefed-up blue line, a locked-in goalie … and a whole lot of puck luck.

The Avalanche are a bit of a different case. When asked by ESPN of what teams should learn from Colorado in order to put themselves over the top, Gabriel Landeskog bluntly replied: “Find a Cale Makar somewhere.” 

Easy-peasy. Of course, while it could be easy to just chalk up Colorado’s title to the fact that they were able to roll out a generational talent on defense in Makar and a franchise 1C in Nathan MacKinnon — there are plenty of other lessons that a team like the Bruins could learn from Colorado in terms of how they managed to build a dominant (and sustainable) winner.

Committing to rebuilds — and nailing draft picks 

This one is the most obvious, and perhaps the hardest one for the Bruins to fully grasp, especially given the likelihood that the B’s just turn back towards a “run it back” mentality if Patrice Bergeron is indeed set to return for a 19th season.

But like it or not, the foundation of every dominant NHL franchise lies in cultivating and developing legit talent through the draft — and Sakic and the Avs have nailed it time and time again.

Sure, when Colorado fell into the No. 1 overall pick in 2013, MacKinnon was the runaway favorite and — along with Landeskog — the starting template of the core that Colorado is now reaping the benefits of. 

But since Sakic was handed the keys to the franchise and given the final say on Colorado’s personnel decisions, the Avs haven’t really missed on the rest of their high-end picks — adding Mikko Rantanen, Cale Makar and Bowen Byram with top-10 selections. Tyson Jost (10th overall in 2016) stands as a bit of an outlier, but he was eventually swapped in a deal back in March for Nico Sturm.

Of course, rebuilding is rarely an easy process, with a promising Colorado roster bottoming out in 2016-17 after Patrick Roy abandoned ship as head coach and multiple players stalled in their development. The Avs only won 22 games, a projected building block in Matt Duchene wanted out and it felt as though the franchise was back at square one. 

But rather than tear down things down once again and ship off players like Landeskog, Sakic and the Avs went out and plucked the fleet-footed Makar out of the AJHL with the fourth overall pick in 2017 — a draft-day steal that will haunt teams like the Devils (Nico Hischier, 1st overall) and the Flyers (Nolan Patrick, 2nd overall) for years to come. 

Add in an eventual trade of Duchene to the Senators in 2017 that, at the end of the day, led to the additions of Byram (who thrived this postseason) and another blue-line stalwart in Samuel Girard, and Sakic and the Avs are in the enviable position they’re in now because of proper drafting and maximizing assets during the perilous trek that comes with a rebuild. 

Building a foundation on blue line

As we noted earlier, one of the common themes on teams that make it to the Cup Final is a hefty D corps — capable of both snuffing out scoring chances and wearing down opponents over the grind of the postseason.

If you want the tale of the tape with a few previous squads that went far in the postseason…

2019 St. Louis Blues 

Alex Pietrangelo - 6-foot-3, 210 pounds
Colton Parayko - 6-foot-6, 230 pounds
Jay Bouwmeester - 6-foot-4, 206 pounds
Carl Gunnarsson - 6-foot-2, 198 pounds
Joel Edmundson - 6-foot-4, 215 pounds
Vince Dunn - 6-foot-0, 203 pounds

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2020 Tampa Bay Lightning

Victor Hedman - 6-foot-6, 223 pounds
Ryan McDonagh - 6-foot-1, 215 pounds
Mikhail Sergachev - 6-foot-3, 215 pounds
Erik Cernak - 6-foot-3, 233 pounds
Kevin Shattenkirk - 6-foot-0, 206 pounds
Zach Bogosian - 6-foot-3, 221 pounds

2020-21 Montreal Canadiens

Shea Weber - 6-foot-4, 229 pounds
Joel Edmundson - 6-foot-4, 215 pounds
Ben Chiarot - 6-foot-3, 225 pounds
Jeff Petry - 6-foot-3, 197 pounds
Jon Merrill - 6-foot-3, 195 pounds
Erik Gustafsson - 6-foot-0, 197 pounds

Now, the Avalanche’s defense isn’t exactly a murderer’s row when it comes to their heft.

Devon Toews - 6-foot-1, 191 pounds
Cale Makar - 5-foot-11, 187 pounds
Bowen Byram - 6-foot-1, 190 pounds
Josh Manson - 6-foot-3, 218 pounds
Erik Johnson - 6-foot-4, 225 pounds
Jack Johnson - 6-foot-1, 227 pounds

The additions of bigger bodies like Manson absolutely paid dividends in the postseason, with the often-maligned Jack Johnson stepping in for an injured Girard — who clocks in at just 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds.

No, the Avs didn’t exactly pummel teams into submission, but Colorado’s D corps was still an essential cog in their success, especially when it came to generating offense for a team that can light the lamp three or four times in the blink of an eye.

Of course, having an otherworldly talent like Makar leading the way on the blue line helps out quite a bit. But the Avs’ personnel is also catered toward crisp transition play and shot generation from up high. Makar might be the cheat code that Colorado can turn to when the going gets tough and teams are clogging up the neutral zone, but the Avs have plenty of other D-men capable of uncorking shots and gaining entries. 

Of the 213 NHL defensemen who logged at least 500 minutes of 5v5 ice time this past season, the Avs had five in the top 85 in terms of shots on goal per 60 minutes of play.

Erik Johnson (6.85 shots per 60 minutes - 15th overall)
Cale Makar (6.76 shots per 60 minutes - 17th overall)
Devon Toews (5.99 shots per 60 minutes - 37th overall)
Bowen Byram (5.09 shots per 60 minutes - 67th overall)
Josh Manson (4.77 shots per 60 minutes - 85th overall)

Generating offense off of low-to-high plays and salvos of shots from the point was a venture that Bruce Cassidy and the Bruins tired but failed to accomplish over the last few seasons — with the lack of capable shooters on the B’s D corps limiting the number of avenues available for Boston to generate some consistent even-strength scoring chances.

Adding a bunch of big bodies to your blue line certainly helps in the postseason. But in order to thrive in today’s NHL, you also need a D corps capable of jumpstarting your offense by way of shots from up high in the offensive zone. 

Utilizing a crafty (and aggressive) front office

Sure, most of the Avs' success can be tied to the sizable contributions put forth by the likes of MacKinnon, Makar, Landeskog and Rantanen. But the moves that put this roster over the top in a competitive postseason bracket were a mix of Sakic finding value in free agency and capitalizing on opportunistic deals.

Rather than splurge in the feeding frenzy of free agency and attempt to sign a number of players to patch up holes in the lineup, the Avs instead did their homework on low-cost, high-reward targets like Valeri Nichushkin — a high-energy, north-south skater who they inked to a one-year, $850,000 contract back in 2019.

Since then, Nichushkin has been one of the more underrated two-way wings in the game — and perhaps the most dogged forechecker in the entire league. Rather than hamstring themselves with spending sprees, Sakic and the Avs instead made the most of the cap flexibility available to them, especially after MacKinnon signed a bargain seven-year, $44.1 million contract back in July 2016.

Sakic capitalized off of the misfortunes of other squads dealing with fiscal crunches — plucking Andre Burakovsky from the Caps in 2019 for Scott Kosmachuk, a second and third-round pick before stealing pending RFA Devon Toews from the Islanders for a pair of second-round picks in 2020. 

Add in a 2019 trade for Nazem Kadri in which Colorado once again made the most of an asset operating at his lowest value, and the Avs sure have few regrets about adding a 2C who went out and tallied 87 points in 71 games this past season — including 15 points in 16 postseason outings. 

The Avs have certainly set themselves apart from other front offices in the past few years with their aggressive and imaginative ways of adding legit middle-six and top-four talent. But Sakic and Co. also followed a similar script from other recent Cup Final participants by being aggressive at the trade deadline — with deals for Artturi Lehkonen, Manson, Andrew Colginato and Sturm all more than worth some of the hefty prices that they paid. 

Colorado might have the core in place to compete year in and year out for the foreseeable future, but good on Sakic and his team for knowing when to pool some of their assets and swing for the fences with deadline help this season. 

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Of course, while there is plenty that a team like Boston can glean from Colorado — especially practical applications like an added emphasis on shots from the blue line — the Avs very well might just be their own unicorn when it comes to just how dominant they were in 2021-22, especially with some unconventional sources of strength. 

After all, while previous Cup runners were usually anchored by goalies in the midst of some absurd runs, the Avs’ Darcy Kuemper was entirely mortal throughout this run (.902 save percentage this postseason). 

Still, for as much as Colorado was justly rewarded for dicing up the rest of the NHL all season long, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for another upstart underdog or potentially over-the-hill veteran core to orchestrate another memorable run in the most unpredictable postseason in sports. 

There’s a reason why the NHL is a copycat league. Because sometimes, all it takes is a roster tweak, a lopsided trade or something as unpredictable as a tumbling puck — to set a team on a path toward a memorable run.