The Colorado Avalanche have a history of trying to rekindle the careers of fading youngsters
Diamonds in the Rough
With Jonathan Bernier, Colin Wilson and Nail Yakupov joining the team this off-season, the Colorado Avalanche have added three more former first round picks whose careers haven’t been what their original team hoped for. Enter Colorado, which hopes to polish these players into regular contributors
It’s become a recurring theme for the franchise, with decidedly poor results.
The team has tried many times to squeeze blood from stone since the rebuild era began in 2009. Peter Mueller, Jordan Caron, Brandon Gormely and Mikhail Grigorenko are all names that leap to mind as reclamation projects the Colorado Avalanche have undertaken. Some of them were promising but fell apart. Some were in pieces before they ever arrived. None of them have been what management hoped for.
Yet they keep trying. If there’s one bit of consistency in recent years, it’s that the Avalanche have relied on a reclamation project to come in and fill a void in the top of the lineup.
With Yakupov, at least, the mentality appears to be intact.
Igor Larionov, Yakupov's agent, also said Sakic sees Yak as a top-6 winger
— Igor Eronko (@IgorEronko) July 4, 2017
There’s nothing inherently wrong with reclamation projects. They do become problematic when a team depends on them as much as the Avalanche have. Hopefully the front office continues to try and wring production from low cost players, only in secondary roles rather than important ones. Bernier and Wilson seem to fit this mold rather nicely.
For now, there’s nothing to do but wait and see what Wilson, Yakupov and Bernier do for the Colorado Avalanche, and hope their results are better than what we’ve see so far.
This first pair didn’t set the bar very high.