The Stanley Cup could be awarded Sunday night, and the past two weeks haven’t made a stunning collapse any easier to digest for Colorado Avalanche fans.
If anything, it might be worse.
Joe Sakic and Josh Kroenke spoke about the end of the season and what’s next earlier this week. While plenty of Avs fans have clamored online for significant changes, it sure sounded like the two men at the top of the franchise’s food chain see a different path forward.
“Yes, we had a tough last week of hockey, but we still, from September on — we won the Presidents’ Trophy,” Sakic said Thursday. “We had the most points in franchise history. We played really well against L.A., really well against Minnesota. We played against a team that, just for that time, played better than we did. No excuses, but we’ll be ready for next year. So overall, it was a great year.”
That is the great dichotomy of this Avalanche team at this specific point. This was a wildly successful group for nearly seven months. This was a team that failed, in the span of one week, and ultimately won exactly half (eight) of the number of postseason games it expected to.
How Sakic, now the general manager along with his president of hockey operations duties, and the Avs move forward, does hinge in part on analyzing what went wrong against the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Final. But how much stock to put in four losses versus the previous 91 games?
How much does the failure against Vegas connect to the failures against Dallas the previous two seasons? For some fans, that is everything. For the people who run NHL franchises, there is nuance and context.
For Sakic, Kroenke and the Avs, the analysis of that nuance and context could define the remaining years of Nathan MacKinnon’s prime. What has transpired with the Golden Knights — and with the Carolina Hurricanes — has offered more context to analyze.
How have both of their runs offered insight into the Avs? It’s still pretty complicated, but let’s dig through some of it.
Let’s start with Vegas. If Carolina wins Sunday night in Game 6, it will be nearly impossible to not look at the Golden Knights’ 2026 playoff run as an outlier. And specifically, that this Vegas team, with 82 regular-season games and 18 other playoff contests outside of the conference final, beating Colorado in four games, will be one of the great outliers in playoff history.
That’s not to say Vegas didn’t deserve to beat Colorado. But how the Golden Knights did it is entirely antithetical to everything else about their playoff run and season at large. This was a championship-contending club on paper, but it rarely played like one. It may still win one, though something drastic will need to change after how Carolina has taken full control of this series — the Hurricanes are currently on a 13-6 run since falling behind 4-0 in Game 3.
Vegas absolutely devised a game plan to slow down Colorado and executed it to near perfection. For all but one period of four games, the Golden Knights looked like one of the best defensive teams in the sport.
For much of the other 17 playoff games against two inferior teams (Utah, Anaheim) and one similar club (Carolina) to Colorado, the Golden Knights have simply not been that same positionally sound, mistake-free juggernaut.
Vegas has allowed four or more goals nine times in 17 playoff games against non-Avs opponents. The Knights allowed four goals total in 11 of the 12 periods against the Avalanche, with one mistake-prone period in Game 3.
Here is Vegas’ expected goals allowed per 60 minutes, broken down by series, per Natural Stat Trick:
Utah – 2.69
Anaheim – 3.25
Colorado – 2.79
Carolina – 3.02
What changed against the Avs? Carter Hart’s six-game heater, beginning at the end of the Anaheim series, is definitely part of it. Hart went 6-4 with a .905 save percentage to start this playoff run, then 6-0 with a .948 and has followed that up with 2-3 and a historically bad .856 in the Stanley Cup Final.
How did Vegas play so well defensively against the Avs, and how has Carolina (and Anaheim) managed to find so much joy in the offensive end are two critical questions for Colorado’s front office to answer. There are other weird nuggets that point to Vegas having an out-of-body experience for a week against Colorado — like how the Golden Knights have found almost no depth scoring against the other three teams, but their “other guys” poured in seven goals against the Avs.
But for the Avs’ purposes, what went wrong for them against Vegas, and whether or not it is preventable in the future, is key. The Avs built a regular-season Terminator, and for two rounds, it looked great in the playoffs, as well.
Meanwhile, Carolina’s run to within a game of a championship offers other types of insight to ponder. Rod Brind’Amour has been one of the three most successful coaches of the past eight years, along with Colorado’s Jared Bednar and Tampa Bay’s Jon Cooper.
Those are the three teams with the most regular-season points accumulated in that span. But Brind’Amour has dealt with similar criticism as what Bednar has faced the past few seasons — namely, his style doesn’t translate to success in the postseason. Carolina made the conference finals three times before 2026 and went 1-12.
The Hurricanes stuck with their head coach, and are a win away from the ultimate reward. Cooper hasn’t won a playoff series in four years, but he has two championships on his resume and a third trip to the Cup Final.
Bednar’s resume falls in between those two. Will the patience and continuity preached by Sakic and Kroenke pay off?
There’s been another defining characteristic for the Hurricanes in the postseason under Brind’Amour — terrible special teams. From 2018-25, Carolina was 12th on the power play and first on the penalty kill across seven regular seasons. But, among the 23 clubs with 20-plus playoff games in that span, the Hurricanes’ power play cratered to 22nd, and the PK fell to 16th.
The day before this Stanley Cup Final began, Carolina’s power play was at 12.5% in this postseason. Then, against a Vegas team that had killed off 87.5% of its foe’s power plays through three rounds, it suddenly sprang to life.
Carolina is 6-for-16 with the extra man in this series, cooking at 37.5%, and one of the reasons why the Hurricanes have gained control. What happened, and what the Avs can glean from this Hurricanes run, could certainly be useful information.
Does there need to be structural changes with how this Avalanche team plays? Does there need to be more adaptability, or maybe just a different kind of adaptability, when a team tries to play the way Vegas did, or how Dallas played in 2025?
Is there something about the current personnel that needs to change to improve the odds in the postseason?
The answers are likely somewhere in between massive changes and none at all.
