Colorado Avalanche

Team information

• Inaugural season: 1972 (WHA); 1979 (NHL)
• Home arena: Ball Arena, Denver, Colorado
• Owner: Ann Walton Kroenke
• Team colors: Burgundy, blue, silver, and black

Overview

The Colorado Avalanche is an American franchise in the National Hockey League (NHL) that plays in the Central Division of the Western Conference. The team began as the Quebec Nordiques in 1972 when it was part of the World Hockey Association (WHA). The Nordiques became part of the NHL in 1979 with the merger of the two leagues. After several successful years, the team started performing poorly and was consistently at or near the bottom of the league, which had only one benefit: It received several consecutive first-round draft picks. While this improved its play somewhat, the team continued to have financial difficulties and was sold in 1995. Colorado, which had not had a hometown hockey team since 1982, proved to be a hockey-hungry town. The increased turnout improved the team’s financial situation. This, combined with the acquisition of some key players, most notably goalie Patrick Roy, led to the team finishing on top of its division and winning the league’s championship Stanley Cup in its first season in Colorado. It followed this by winning the division title seven more times to set a league record and qualifying for the playoffs in each of its first ten seasons in Colorado. In 2000–2001, the Avalanche finished on top of the league and played its way into the Stanley Cup final again in the 2000–2001 season. It won that series against the defending champion New Jersey Devils by four games to three. Following an era of rebuilding throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the Colorado Avalanche ended a multi-year dry spell by defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2021–22 Stanley Cup Finals.

History

The Colorado Avalanche began life as one of the founding franchises in the World Hockey Association (WHA). As hockey grew in popularity in North America in the 1960s and early 1970s, more cities wanted to host hometown teams. However, the National Hockey League (NHL), which originally had only six teams, approached growth with caution. In response, several attempts were made to create rival leagues, the most successful of which was the WHA. In 1972, investors pulled together the funds to field twelve teams and entice several high-recognition NHL players to join them. Teams began playing their first games on October 11, 1972.

One of these teams was the Quebec Nordiques, or the Quebec Northmen. The league continued to expand, adding two more teams the following year, but soon experienced financial difficulties. Eventually, many of the big-name players it had recruited from the ranks of the NHL returned to that league, and the WHA was in serious trouble. Only six teams were left by 1979. Following an agreement that same year, four WHA teams, including the Nordiques, were made expansion teams in the NHL.

At the time, the Nordiques were owned by the Carling O’Keefe Brewery, which took ownership of the team in 1977. In 1987, a group led by Canadian lawyer and former head of the Canadian Olympic Committee Marcel Aubut bought the team after the O’Keefe Brewery was purchased by the Molson Brewery, which owned the rival NHL franchise Montreal Canadiens. Under Aubut’s ownership, the team signed three brothers from Czechoslovakia—Anton, Marion, and Peter Stastny—and became the first North American team to sign players who defected from a communist country.

The team advanced to the conference championship series in 1982 before being eliminated by the New York Islanders 4–0. It finished first in its division the next year but had four mediocre years in a row, finishing at the bottom of the league for three of these years. Because the first pick in the following year’s entry draft for new players goes to the team with the worst record the previous year, Quebec’s poor performance led to three consecutive first picks in the draft. In 1991, the Nordiques chose Eric Lindros, one of the most eagerly anticipated young players in a number of years. However, Lindros refused to sign with the club and was eventually traded to the Philadelphia Flyers for five good players: Steve Duchesne, Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Kerry Huffman, and Mike Ricci. The team also received two future first-round draft picks and future considerations, which was the later trade of Chris Simon and $15 million.

This dramatically improved the quality of play in Quebec. However, the team was struggling financially and in May 1995, the franchise was sold to COMSAT Video. The new owners relocated the team to Colorado, which had not had a team since the Colorado Rockies moved east to become the New Jersey Devils in 1982. Unable to reuse the “Rockies” name because it was being used by a baseball franchise, the new owners considered several names before naming the team after the avalanches that occur in Colorado’s mountains. COMSAT also reorganized the Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, the National Basketball Association (NBA) team that shared the McNichols Sports Arena with the Avalanche, into a new subsidiary company, Ascent Entertainment Group Inc. COMSAT retained ownership of most of the subsidiary while the remainder was made available for public trading in the stock exchange.

Colorado Avalanche

In its first year in Denver, the relocated franchise had a strong base in team captain and starting line center Joe Sakic, forward Peter Forsberg, and defenseman Adam Foote. The team was further strengthened with the addition of goalie Patrick Roy, a perennial all-star from the Montreal Canadiens. Roy joined the team on December 6, 1995, along with Mike Keane, in exchange for three Avalanche players. The team finished the 1995–1996 season with a record of 47–25–10 and won the Pacific Division of the Western Conference.

In 1999, the Ascent Entertainment Group agreed to sell the Avalanche, the Nuggets, and their new home, the Pepsi Center. The buyer was to be a partnership run by Bill Laurie and his wife, Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie. In 2000, billionaire Enos Stanley Kroenke, husband of Nancy Walton Laurie’s sister and fellow heiress, Ann Walton Kroenke, purchased both teams and the arena after the deal with Laurie did not work out.

In the 2000–2001 season, the hockey team marched through the playoffs, winning the conference quarter, semi, and final series in six games each and reaching the Stanley Cup finals as the Western Conference champions. There, it faced the New Jersey Devils. The Avalanche won the seven-game series four games to three, with Roy being named the most valuable player of the finals and thus earning the Conn Smythe Trophy. The championship win led to an iconic moment in hockey history. Avalanche captain Joe Sakic received the Stanley Cup from league president Gary Bettman and then handed it to respected veteran defenseman Ray Bourque for the traditional skating of the cup around the rink. Bourque, all-star captain and future Hall of Famer who played all his twenty-two-year career as a Boston Bruin, had mutually agreed to a trade to allow him a chance to win the cup before he retired.

The team struggled for a time after being forced to release Forsburg, Foote, and others to meet the newly implemented salary cap. It struggled through much of the 2000s, managing to win the division championship a few times but failing to advance in Stanley Cup play. However, the team remained popular among fans.

Despite the acquisition of star centre Nathan MacKinnon in 2013, the Avalanche continued to struggle into the mid-2010s. A retired Joe Sakic returned to the team as general manager in 2013, and in 2016 the Avalanche hired head coach Jared Bednar. Both began the difficult task of rebuilding the organization into Stanley Cup contenders. After trading away their star forward Matt Duchene (who was pulled off the ice and traded mid-game) in 2017, the Avalanche made a series of acquisitions, including defenseman Cale Makar (who in 2022 won both the James Norris Memorial Trophy, awarded to the league's best defenseman in a given year, and the Conn Smythe Trophy, given to the most valuable player in the Stanley Cup Finals), the Avalanche quickly returned to competitive form and made playoff appearances in every season between 2017 and 2021. Previously, in May 2019, it was announced that the team ownership and the City of Denver had reached an agreement to keep the team there until 2040.

Then, in 2022, following an extremely successful 2021–22 season, the Colorado Avalanche defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning, the reigning two-time Stanley Cup champions, in the 2022 Stanley Cup Finals to win their third Stanley Cup.

The Avalanche are also fan favorites. They regularly play to capacity crowds in the 18,007-seat Ball Arena.

Notable players

A total of twelve players who have played with the Avalanche have been named to the NHL Hockey Hall of Fame. In addition to Sakic, Roy, Bourque, and Forsberg, they include Dave Andreychuk, Rob Blake, Jarome Iginla, Paul Kariya, Jari Kurri, Teemu Selanne, Bryan John Trottier, and Pierre Turgeon. The team has retired the numbers of Sakic, Forsberg, Roy, Foote, and Bourque along with Milan Hejduk.

Sakic holds the team record for games played (1,378), career goals (625), career assists (1,016), and career points (1,641). He also tops the team in season highs with 54 goals (2000–2001), 120 points in a season (1995–1996), and 12 game-winning goals (2000–2001). (Nathan MacKinnon tied the latter during the 2017-2018 season). Sakic also notched several team high marks in the playoffs, with 18 goals and 34 points in the 1996 playoffs and a total of eight career game-winning goals in the playoffs. He scored 100 points in the 2006–2007 season, becoming the second-oldest player to accomplish this.

Forsberg’s contributions to the team included a team-best 86 assists in the 1995–1996 season. He is tied for the team record for plus/minus, an NHL statistic that measures the balance between offense and defense by taking the number of times a player is on the goal when his team scores a goal and subtracting the number of times he is on the ice when the other team scored. Forsberg and Hejduk share the team plus/minus record for the regular season with 52 in the 2002–2003 season, while Forsberg holds the team record for best career plus/minus in the playoffs with 54.

Roy, who would return to the team after retirement to coach from 2013–2016, notched the team’s best shutout record, with 9 in 2001–2002. He holds the team record for best goals against average with 1.94 recorded that same year.

Of the three Stastny brothers who joined the team after defecting, Peter was the most successful with the team. He is second in all-time team scoring and assists only to Sakic, with 1,239 career points and 789 career assists.

The Avalanche used their first overall pick to draft centre Nathan MacKinnon in the 2013 NHL Entry Draft. Highly sought after due to his success in the Canadian junior leagues, MacKinnon quickly earned a reputation as one of the NHL's star players, particularly for his goal scoring ability and high quality of play in the postseason. (In 2014 MacKinnon was awarded the Calder Memorial Trophy, awarded to the NHL's rookie of the year, for his performance in the 2013–14 season.) MacKinnon later won a Stanley Cup with the Avalanche in 2022.

Bibliography

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