In the wake of its worst season in Colorado, it’s easy to rip on the Avalanche, and pretty much everyone is.
What goaltending it had, it traded away.
What defense it had was invisible.
What offense it had was mediocre, which was nowhere near good enough to make up for the sieve behind it.
The Avs led the NHL in goals allowed, which is not one of the categories you’re looking to lead. They registered their fewest points in the standings — 68 — since they played in Quebec and were called the Nordiques.
In fact, ripping the Avs now is almost as popular as ripping baseball’s Rockies back in the middle-aughts. This might not be a coincidence.
As with the Rockies of those days, many fans blame ownership. Does Kroenke Sports Enterprises actually care about hockey? Or do the Avs just fill in open dates at the Pepsi Center while the Kroenkes focus on basketball . . . and American football . . . and English football?
Even as the Avs limped off the stage, E. Stanley Kroenke was preparing to take control of Arsenal in the English Premier League, less than a year after taking control of the Rams of the NFL. If he’s surrendering control of the NBA’s Nuggets, as NFL cross-ownership rules require, you couldn’t tell it as he romped around their locker room following Saturday night’s victory over the Timberwolves.
Does that leave any love for the Avs?
“I hate when people say ownership isn’t committed to the Avalanche, because I think we are, and we are more than ever,” Josh Kroenke, Silent Stanley’s son and Avalanche governor, said Sunday.
“Everyone’s committed, from my dad, myself, Pierre (Lacroix), Greg Sherman, and now we’ve got Joe Sakic coming on board, which I’m really excited about, to help kind of usher in a new era. I think he’s a great hockey mind and obviously he knows the organization like the back of his hand, so he’s going to be great to have around.”
But in what capacity? What is an “executive adviser” exactly?
“We gave him a very broad title where he can go anywhere,” Kroenke said. “He’s going to be representing us at governors’ meetings sometimes, with Pierre, he’s going to be all over the place learning as much as he can about the business side, now that he’s transitioning from a player role to an executive.”
The comparisons with John Elway and the Broncos are inevitable — Hall of Fame players returning in business suits to rescue their teams from obsolescence. Kroenke suggested Sakic might get there, but not right away.
“To Joe’s credit, he’s such an amazingly humble person, he wants to make sure that he knows what he needs to know before he feels he deserves a role like the Elway-type role with the Broncos,” Kroenke said. “A couple of years from now, maybe we’ll move him into a different role.”
But Kroenke also left open the possibility of organizational changes as soon as this summer.
“This week we’re going to make plans to sit down — myself, Pierre, Joe and the Avalanche staff as a whole — and discuss the season, discuss any holes we have on our roster that they think we need to fill and just kind of discuss the next three- or four-year outlook,” Kroenke said.
“We’re really looking forward to getting Joe in the room and seeing what he has for ideas. And then we’re going to finalize the structure and see if anything needs to be shuffled around this summer.”
Kroenke does not apologize for the team’s rock-bottom payroll, saying the plan is to build from within, not to sign expensive free agents. Over time, the homegrown players will need to be paid and the payroll will rise, he said.
You might recall that the Rockies made a similar case in the mid-aughts. It was widely ridiculed as an excuse for being cheap. So it’s worth noting that the plan actually worked for the Rocks, who now have an exciting, largely homegrown team with a payroll that has nearly doubled.
But Avs fans have legitimate questions about the organization’s personnel decisions as it rebuilds. Now that the club is no longer NHL royalty with guaranteed sellouts, it may find, as the Broncos have, that it needs to be more publicly accountable than it’s been in the past.
Toward that end, the younger Kroenke looks like an improvement over his father. The Avs have a big hill to climb, but their fans also need to face facts. The team’s first decade in Colorado defined sporting excellence. When Adam Foote left the ice for the final time Sunday, he turned out the lights on that era.
The Red Wings notwithstanding, this is what rebuilding looks like. You could ask the Broncos.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
