The players finished eating but stayed seated in the Four Seasons hotel meal room. They knew the drill.
Team meetings were common in the playoffs. Jared Bednar had called one when the Avalanche landed in St. Louis after a demoralizing Game 5 loss last spring. With an off day in the late stages of a tense second-round playoff series, the coach wanted to check on his team’s headspace.
“We didn’t want a repeat of Vegas,” he told The Post.
A year earlier, the Avalanche coughed up a 2-0 series lead to the Golden Knights — their third consecutive year getting eliminated in the second round. So when they started to show cracks in the armor with a two-game lead over the Blues, memories came flooding back. The Avs led a potential close-out Game 5 at home in the final minute. It was the closest they had come in Bednar’s tenure to exorcising the second-round demons. Flying back to St. Louis for Game 6 felt as far as they’d been.
“He really wanted us to get over that hump,” forward Andrew Cogliano recalled.
Nobody in the room needed to get over that hump more than Bednar himself, the coach who oversaw the Avalanche’s early exits.
Looking back, Bednar understands what might’ve been at stake for his own career. But he has learned over seven seasons as an NHL coach to compartmentalize any fears that bubble below the surface. “I don’t think about getting let go or trying to impress people,” he told The Post in an interview this March. “All I think about is winning.”
There are multiple revolving-door moments when the Avalanche could’ve fired Bednar. Instead, he’s entering the 2023 playoffs Tuesday (8 p.m. MT) with a Stanley Cup to defend and a brand-new, three-year contract extension highlighting the organization’s faith in him.
Colorado’s strenuous sequel to the Stanley Cup season has been proof of his credibility as the league’s third longest-tenured coach. Navigating the season-long absence of team captain Gabriel Landeskog and the roster attrition caused by a constant flow of other injuries, Bednar still shepherded the Avalanche to a late surge and another division title. In other words, this year is different. The pressure isn’t as claustrophobic — not that Bednar cares one way or the other.
A critical conversation with Sakic
Bednar’s head slumped when he was informed the questions would be entirely about him. “Not again,” he said with an awkward laugh.
If he was wary, it’s because he’s been asked to publicly self-reflect this season more than any other. That’s an inevitable side-effect of winning a championship, becoming a franchise’s all-time winningest coach and signing a contract extension.
Reaching the wins milestone seemed like a distant fantasy during Bednar’s first season in Denver. The Avs’ 48 points in 2016-17 remain the fewest in a full season for any NHL team this century.
“Losing bugs me,” he said March 25, leaning against a railing that overlooks the Avs’ practice rink in Centennial. “It sticks with me a little bit. And I find I’m getting better at getting over it, but still, even regular-season losses. They frustrate me, and I just don’t like it.”
When “things started to fall apart” late that first season, as Bednar described it, Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic gave Bednar a mini pep talk. The message: Don’t waste the remaining games just because they mean nothing in the standings. Sakic wanted Bednar to prioritize the development of a select few players — the core Sakic planned to build around.
“These are the guys that we really want to focus on,” Bednar recalled from the conversation. “Stay on them about playing the right way. Keep trying to get them to buy into what you’re selling.”
The central names included Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog.
“It was such a tough year that it was hard to stay positive,” MacKinnon said. “But Bedsy definitely did.”
Bednar was encouraged by the forward-looking scope of Sakic’s message, but “we didn’t talk about my situation at all” during that conversation or at all during the season. So naturally, as the season ended, “I was a little worried that I’d get let go,” Bednar said.
He knew what he signed up for; it’s not a forgiving league, even for first-time coaches. That doesn’t stop the nerves.
End-of-year discussions with management gave him clarity that he was safe. “The pressure seemed to be off our team,” he said. “There was no place to go but up.”
The frustrating one
The pressure renewed every year as Bednar established a pattern of making the playoffs. Stagnating in the second round overtook the dismal first season as a primary cause for impatience. By the time Vegas eliminated the Avalanche in 2021, Bednar was aware of the calls to fire him.
As much as he hates losing, he also contextualizes losses differently with time.
“What happens in my opinion is media, fans, they like to group everything together,” Bednar said. “‘Third straight second-round loss. Is this time for a change?’ But for me, they were totally different. We had a second-round loss against a really good San Jose team that was constantly going to the conference finals, and we were a young team in the second year of a rebuild. … I thought we had a really good series and a chance to win that series. We lost. We just weren’t there yet. And the next year (against Dallas), we had so many injuries that we couldn’t sustain our game.
“The frustrating one was Vegas because we just didn’t play well. At the most important time of the year, we didn’t play our game.”
He thinks he treated it as too big a deal when the Avs lost Game 3 in Sin City. He and his players were hung up on one game. “We got discouraged,” he said, and it snowballed. A President’s Trophy season came crashing down.
Bednar said there was no moment when the front office officially told him he would remain. So he just carried on as usual.
“I still had a year left on my deal at that point,” he said. “My contract wasn’t up. So I’m coaching until management makes the decision and says, ‘Hey, you’re not coaching anymore.'”
Bednar doubled down on his tactical systems after that 2021 playoff ouster. He didn’t want to change a thing about the team’s style or identity. That offseason was more about mental reevaluation. Why had the Vegas series unraveled?
“The guys are doing the same thing. They’re not all my ideas,” he said. “Everyone has a say. Players, regardless of experience: You’ve got something to say you think could help? Then bring it to the table. I’m just responsible for gathering those thoughts, and then helping present them to the team. … We all felt the same way. Was Vegas better than us? I don’t know. We didn’t play our best. For that two-week stretch, they were better than us. So what happens when you lose Game 5 at home against St. Louis? How are you going to react?”
“Like a brother”
The behind-the-scenes meetings that precede triumphant turnarounds are the ones that generally find their way outside the room. Sometimes, the motivational speech just doesn’t work. That was in the back of Bednar’s mind as he addressed the Avs on May 26, 2022.
“We had meetings in the Vegas series too, you know,” he says now.
The 2021 second-round series tormented him for a year — a symptom of his struggle to let losses go. Veteran players including MacKinnon shared that psychological battle. After a loss as dramatic as Game 5 to the Blues, Colorado’s apparent curse became magnified again.
“Obviously with the past,” J.T. Compher said, “it creeps into your mind.”
Hence Bednar’s call to action. If Vegas was on his mind, he knew it must be nagging at the players, too. So there were no X’s and O’s discussed. Bednar wanted to avoid the same repetitive fate by forgetting about it.
“Don’t let past years or past failures cloud you in the here and now,” defenseman Jack Johnson remembers Bednar saying.
“It was almost like a brother talking to his other brothers,” Cogliano said. “That’s what Bedsy has going for him. He has a very good personality where he can relate to a lot of guys.”
After leading off, he opened up the room for players to share their thoughts. It set an early template for the Stanley Cup Finals, when during a parallel fork in the road: losing Game 5 at home with a chance to clinch.
Both times, Colorado won Game 6 on the road.
“When we came out of that meeting, we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to win tomorrow in St. Louis,'” Bednar said. “That was the feeling that I had.”
Role reversal
It’s the same feeling Bednar had after meetings during the Vegas series.
Nothing seemed to work one year. Everything did the next. He can’t explain why. But he knows the dual experiences helped him improve his capacity to make peace with the capricious nature of his own profession.
“This is why I think Joe and Chris (MacFarland) are so good — is because they kept the group together,” he said. “And we learned from that heartbreak, and then we won. I don’t know that we win without that heartache.”
The new challenge is the inverse of that: Can the Avalanche win now that they have won?
“Thatap what the whole year has been about,” Bednar said. “We’ve had conversations from the start of the year, going, ‘Man, we’ve gotta go do that again?’ Because they remember how hard it was.”
The same role reversal is true for Bednar. He doesn’t have something to prove as a coach this time. His job isn’t on the line. It’s almost as if he’s playing with house money.
He would disagree. Exactly for the same reason he would disagree with the notion that he was coaching for his job when he called that meeting in St. Louis.
“I don’t think of it like that. Sometimes you’re going to lay it all out there as a team, and you’re not going to win,” Bednar said. “Sometimes you’re going to play really well, and you still might lose. A matchup doesn’t work. You don’t get the puck luck. Itap a fine line between winning and losing. My philosophy is you put everything you can into getting your team where they need to be, and you turn them loose.
“Then there’s no regrets. Results are going to be what they are. I don’t worry about getting an extension or getting let go. I try to compete to win. Thatap it. And I can walk out of the rink every day saying, ‘I like what I do. I’m trying to win again.’ ”
Raising the bar
Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar became the winningest coach in franchise history when he passed Michael Bergeron for the most regular-season wins earlier this season. Now he’s closing in on Bob Hartley for the most playoff wins by a Colorado/Quebec coach as the Avs chase a second consecutive Stanley Cup title.
| Coach | Years | Seasons | Wins* | PTS%* | Playoff wins | Playoff W% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jared Bednar | 2017-pres. | 7 | 290 | .592 | 40 | .635 |
| Michel Bergeron | 1981-90 | 8 | 265 | .486 | 31 | .456 |
| Bob Hartley | 1999-’03 | 5 | 193 | .618 | 49 | .613 |
| Marc Crawford | 1995-98 | 4 | 165 | .631 | 31 | .596 |
| Joel Quenneville | 2006-08 | 3 | 131 | .579 | 8 | .421 |
| Patrick Roy | 2014-16 | 3 | 130 | .577 | 3 | .429 |
| Joe Sacco | 2010-13 | 4 | 130 | .493 | 2 | .333 |
| Tony Granato | 2003-09 | 3 | 104 | .560 | 9 | .500 |
| Pierre Pagé | 1992-94 | 3 | 98 | .489 | 2 | .333 |
| Ron Lapointe | 1988-89 | 2 | 33 | .404 | 0 | N/A |
* Regular season | Source:
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