UPSTART AVS IN A HURRY TO MAKE SOME NOISE
Catch the Avs, if you can. They’re furiously fast. They’re freakin’ good. And they know it. “We feel like we can beat any team,” Avalanche star Nathan MacKinnon told me Wednesday. “If we play our best, we feel like we can beat anybody, which is something we’ve never really felt before on this team.”
As MacKinnon plopped down at his locker, removing his practice gear, he was surrounded by hockey speed that can kill and talent Colorado has not enjoyed since Joe Sakic was skating instead of sitting in the team’s front office.
Led by MacKinnon, the world’s best hockey player on any given night, the big “A” on the team’s sweater is now surrounded by an unspoken but unmistakable “S,” “W” and “G.”
For the first time in a long time, the Avalanche hits the ice with the swag of talented players who have not only have arrived but are itching to knock down the door. I think it’s safe to say Colorado has never put a faster team on the ice. Despite a recent history that has not seen the franchise advance to the conference finals since the spring of 2002 (when MacKinnon was 6 years old), these young, upstart Avs are in a hurry to make some noise.
“It’s good to be humble. But I think that whole ‘we haven’t done anything’ mentality isn’t a really good mentality to have. If you don’t think you can do something, you probably won’t,” MacKinnon said.
“I saw an inspirational movie that said, ‘You’ve got to know you’re good to be good.’ And we’ve got that swag.”
We all understand the NHL season is a long grind. If the Avs are to make the trip to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 19 years, it won’t be all sunshine. They will have to travel through slumps and snow, joust with Knights and fend off Predators.
But among my many blessings while hanging around undisputed champions (the 1997 and 1998 Broncos) and hopeless losers (the 2012-15 Rockies) for the past generation has been to learn there’s
such a big difference between champs and chumps that it often can be discerned merely by walking in the locker room.
The scent of a winner’s confidence is as aromatic as bacon frying on the grill, while the stench of creeping pessimism cannot be masked by a whole grove of magnolia trees. And these Avs have been drenched in a bucket of ‘get out of our way’ confidence.
Hockey guys are humble by nature. They’d rather lose a tooth than flap their lips and brag. But these Avs can sense something in the air, something greater than hope and so real they feel something awesome could be within their reach.
“I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum. Every year, you go into a hockey season with optimism. But I think in some years, we were probably trying to paint lipstick on a pig,” said veteran defenseman Erik Johnson, who has played on teams that have finished both first and last in the Central Division during eight previous seasons in an Avs sweater.
“Now, I think we have a team where not only the group inside the room is excited, but we’re garnering some external expectations, which come with the territory of being an upand-coming team.”
The task now for coach Jared Bednar is to convince his deep team it must constantly sweat the details, whether tightening up lapses at the blue line or doing grunt work required on the forecheck. Those are far happier challenges for a coach to have, rather than worrying about the lack of secondary scoring or praying he can find two NHL-quality players to fill the third defensive pairing.
With veteran defenseman Ian Cole back well ahead of schedule after two hip surgeries, Bednar said there will tough personnel decisions about which talented players to leave in street clothes every night, starting Thursday with a stern home test against undefeated Boston.
The NHL playoffs are built to shatter dreams, with all the proof in the painful falls top seeds Calgary and Tampa Bay took last season, while getting unceremoniously bounced from the opening round. The Avalanche, however, is no longer scared to dream big, think big and win big.
“This is a team I’m really excited about. And it’s a genuine excitement, because there’s just something you feel: We could do something special,” Johnson said. “I think you get that type of feeling from the group.”
Maybe it’s a little quick for even these fast and confident Avs to win a championship. So 2020 might not be their year.
But their time to hoist the Cup is near. And they know it.