Colorado Avalanche: Stacking up the Forwards

The Colorado Avalanche aren’t as stacked with forwards as many people think. The team doesn’t have a single top-30 forward.

I watched nearly every Avalanche game this season, so I can tell you where each of our forwards stands in comparison to one another. However, since neither I nor anyone else has time to watch every single game for every single team, it’s hard to say how our players stack up to the rest of the league. For that we tend to rely on pundits, bloggers, commentators, and statistics.

So with that in mind, being a pundit, blogger and commentator myself, I will give you a comparison of Avalanche forwards based on stats.

The problem with stats in hockey is that no one stat can tell you if a player is good or not. You could use points, but what if they just score a lot because they play with Joe Thornton, or what if they score less because they start every shift in their own zone?

To overcome this difficulty, I have created an overall rating that takes into account a broad range of stats. Using these stats I’ve given every forward in the league who played at least 200 minutes a score out of 100 so that we can, hopefully with some accuracy, actually compare the Colorad o Avalanche to players from different teams. To give you some idea of the scope of this, I will briefly list the stats I used (even strength unless it says otherwise):
(source: war-on-ice)

• Points total.
• Points per minute played (minus 2nd assists).
• Zone starts: defensive vs. offensive zone starts compared to the league average.
• Corsi: shots produced when the player is on the ice vs. off the ice compared to the league average.
• Hits per minute played.
• Giveways per minute played.
• Takeaways per minute played.
• Penalties drawn vs. taken per minute played.
• Average teammates time on ice per game.
• Average opponents time on ice per game.
• Powerplay effectiveness (points + Corsi).
• Penalty kill effectiveness (goals against + Corsi).

Before I give you the numbers for the Avalanche forwards, here are the results for the top 10 forwards in the NHL this season using my system:

And now here are the numbers for our forwards:

I will go into more detail on how some of these players got these scores in future articles, but for now, the thing that jumps out at me here is the lack of high-end forwards. In fact, according to the numbers, Matt Duchene is our only legitimate top line forward and the Avalanche have zero top 30 forwards.

Of the 16 playoff teams, 12 have at least one top 30 forward: Chicago (Kane), Dallas (Benn, Seguin, Spezza), Florida (Barkov, Trocheck, Jagr), L.A. (Kopitar), NYI (Tavares), NYR (Stepan, Zuccarello), Philadelphia (Giroux), Pittsburgh (Crosby, Malkin), San Jose (Pavelski), St. Louis (Tarasenko), Tampa (Stamkos), and Washington (Backstrom, Kuznetsov). The only playoff teams without a top 30 player are Anaheim, Minnesota, Detroit, and Nashville.

The Avalanche, on the other hand, have an abundance of 2nd and 3rd line talent (nine players!), but no top 30 forwards. What this tells me is that this forward lineup is simply not good enough.

Now, if you listen to pretty much any hockey commentator or even many Colorado Avalanche fans, they’ll tell you this team’s problem is defense. I rarely if ever hear people talking about a lack of offensive talent on this team. Most people look at Duchene, MacKinnon and Landeskog, and assume that the Avs forward lineup is stacked.

But the fact is, Duchene, despite being talented, is not an elite superstar by any means. He’s a solid 1st liner, but not nearly consistent enough to be a top player in the league. MacKinnon, too, is unbelievably talented, but has so far been unable to translate that into actual on-ice production. As for Landeskog, based on his play so far in his career, I think he’s a solid 2nd line winger, and that’s it.

What these numbers suggest to me is that maybe our defensive woes are based at least in part on a lack of offensive talent. Maybe, because our players aren’t good enough to dominate offensively, it puts an undue amount of pressure on our defense and goalies to win games.

If we had a superstar or two up front, perhaps people wouldn’t be complaining about our defense so much because we would have the puck more often. So if we want to talk about improving this team, we can’t forget about the fact that we only have one first line forward.

Next: Avalanche Solutions for the Blueline

So what’s the answer here? Well, superstar forwards don’t grow on trees. I think the answer needs to be someone, be it Duchene, MacKinnon, Rantanen, or even Landeskog, stepping up their game and playing at an elite level. Barring that, the Colorado Avalanche are going to need to make it into the playoffs like Nashville or Minnesota through strong defensive play and/or goaltending.

With that in mind, in my next article I’ll show you how our defensemen compare to the rest of the league. Some of the results may surprise you.