Colorado Avalanche Team Bonding at Sporting Events

Colorado Avalanche players have been spending their time off at local sporting events while they wait for their own  play to continue.

The Colorado Avalanche won their series in Game 5, which was last Friday. That means they’ll have had a full week off from playing when they meet the Sharks in San Jose this Friday.

You could look at that week off two ways. One, they might have gotten a tad rusty. They did run full practices Monday, Tuesday and Thursday (today), though.

On the other hand, a full week off has given them a chance to rest and heal. Remember, they were in playoff mode for pretty much six weeks to even make it to the postseason. And a couple players got ill/injured in Round 1. In fact, Jared Bednar has said the team might be fully healthy by Friday.

Anyway, in addition to resting and recuperating, the time off has given the players time to do something else — bond. This team is said to be especially tight anyway. But recently, they’ve been showing up around town at sporting events.

Colorado is really lucky in that we have all four major sports as well as soccer and lacrosse in professional leagues. Stars from the four major sports are famous for going to each other’s games, especially in the playoffs.

Well, this year, while the Colorado Avalanche are playing spring hockey anyway, they took a moment to go see a spring sport — baseball. Several Avs players attended a Rockies game:

As the tweet points out, the players at the game are, from left to right, Derick Brassard, J.T. Compher, Vladislav Kamenev, Tyson Jost, Cale Makar, and Mark Barberio.

For some reason, Kamenev looks really uncomfortable, like he doesn’t know what’s going on. I mean, he is Russian, and they’re not renowned for being baseball fans.

The same crew plus some more showed up to Game 5 of the Denver Nuggets playoff series:

Starting with the top row, we have our captain Gabriel Landeskog, Jost, Alexander Kerfoot, Compher and Mikko Rantanen. In the bottom row, we have Makar, Philipp Grubauer and Kamenev.

Vlad looks a little more comfortable in the picture. But it still seems like the guys are dragging him around to sporting events he’s not comfortable with.

Now, don’t let the calm Cale in the foreground fool you. In fact, our young rookie had donned a cowboy hat earlier in the evening:

He has the head tilt down perfectly. You can also see that Derick Brassard (far back), Erik Johnson (left) and Sven Andrighetto (next to Cale) are part of the group.

The Colorado Avalanche PR group did a better job of catching Cowboy Cale:

Look at the way he tips his hat. Remember, the kid is from Calgary, which is as cowboy as Denver is.

Here’s another view:

Why, lo and behold — look who else made it up on Pepsi Vision. We’ve got our superstar Nathan MacKinnon sitting next to Colin Wilson with team pest Nikita Zadorov behind them.

In fact, Altitude Vic Lombardi spoke with MacKinnon:

Apparently superstars don’t kick it in club level but prefer to sit courtside.

That’s pert near the whole team representing at Pepsi Center for Game 5 of the Nuggets-Spurs series. And we don’t know if any other players might have been lurking behind the scenes in the suite.

Well, the Colorado Avalanche sure seemed to enjoy their forays into the world of other professional sports. They won’t get much time to do that in the near future, though, as they head to San Jose today after practice to begin Round 2.

Maybe some of the other sports team players can enjoy Avs playoff hockey when they return to Pepsi Center.