Colorado Avalanche: Matt Nieto’s 2019-2020 Season Outlook

The Colorado Avalanche might see a reduced role for Matt Nieto, but he may still play his best game in this, his contract year.

The Colorado Avalanche are heading into the 2019-20 season with one of the best rosters they’ve had in a while. They have a good mixture of youth and experience, skill players and grinders.

One of the players who falls more in the experienced grinder category is Matthew Nieto. The Avs picked up Nieto off the waiver wire in January 2017 from the San Jose Sharks.

So far, he’s played 181 games for Colorado, recording 26 goals and 34 assists. They’ve twice signed him to additional contracts. Now, the 26-year-old winger is entering the final year of his two-year deal, after which he’ll be an unrestricted free agent.

So, this makes the 2019-20 season a contract year for Nieto, and an important one. No telling if the Avs would be interested in signing him, but he’s definitely got the inspiration to put his best game on the ice.

Let’s start by looking at Nieto’s stats from last year.

2018-19 Stats

Matt Nieto played 64 games for the Colorado Avalanche. He missed 15 games with a lower body injury. In those games, he recorded four goals and 19 assists for 23 points.

The playoffs were a sight better for Nieto. He recorded four goals and three assists in 12 games.

Nieto was a mainstay of the third line. He saw an average of 13:46 a game last year. In addition to his third line duties, he was a mainstay on the penalty killing unit.

Projected 2019-20 Role

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I don’t think Matt Nieto is going to be a third liner for the Colorado Avalanche this season. Colorado went out and bolstered their middle-six with players like Joonas Donskoi, Andre Burakovsky, and Nazem Kadri. The expectation is also that youngsters such as Tyson Jost and J.T. Compher will solidify their places between the second and third lines.

So, that likely means Nieto will be dropped down to the fourth line. In fact, I reckon that third line will consist of Nieto with Pierre-Édouard Bellemare and Matt Calvert.

In a way that’s good news for Nieto because he’s got chemistry with Calvert. The two played really well together. They had a CorsiFor percent of 55.2% together, and the numbers dropped when they weren’t playing together.

The bad news is their center was Carl Soderberg, whom the Avs traded to the Arizona Coyotes. Soderberg is a site better than Bellemare.

Projected 2019-20 Stats

Another change that Matt Nieto will see is his ice time shrink. I don’t think at the moment there’s any reason he’ll get less time on the penalty kill. However, average ice time for fourth liners on the Colorado Avalanche is around 10 minutes. That’s a decrease of over three minutes for Nieto.

Last season, in the regular season, Matt’s pace was about .026 points per minute. That put him at .0045 goals per minute and .021 assists per minute. His career year (2017-18), when he recorded 15 goals, he scored at a rate of .021 per minute.

Those rates are important to see how Nieto might do with is decreased minutes. So, if we account for his contract year and go with his best per-minute goal production, we might expect .135 goals per game for Matt. In a full 82-game season — which Nieto’s never had — that works out to 11 goals.

If we look at his best assists outlook, we might expect 0.21 assists per game, or 17 assists across a full season. So, maybe, just maybe, 28 points. That would actually be a career high for Nieto.

I suspect the points total might be a little lower, especially if he is unable to play a full season. We might be looking at the 20-point mark.

To be honest, 20 points isn’t bad at all for a fourth liner. It does, in fact, represent an improvement from last season’t fourth liners.

So, while I think Matt Nieto’s role is going to shrink in the 2019-20 season, I don’t think his contribution to the Colorado Avalanche will. What do you expect from Long Beach Native Matt Nieto next season?