Colorado Avalanche: Analysis of Roster on Opening Night Eve

The Colorado Avalanche have reduced their roster to the mandated 23 players and are ready to roll on the eve of opening night.

The Colorado Avalanche will be playing hockey tomorrow! Technically, they’ve been playing hockey for a couple weeks, but it’s the preseason so that doesn’t count.

Tomorrow they start a highly anticipated regular season in which they seem to have a very deep roster — Avs insider Adrian Dater calls it the deepest he’s seen in 15 years.

Now, if you’re in the Denver area and unable to go to the game, you will be unable to watch it on TV. That’s a crying shame. However, the Big 3 carriers — Comcast, DirecTv, and Dish — are strong-arming Altitude TV so they can run their own sports programming.

Yeah, yeah, Stan Kroenke is a billionaire, he can afford to lose some money. This isn’t about the Kroenke Sports Empire, but rather those fine folks at Altitude who are in very real danger of losing their jobs because of the Big 3’s collusion.

Anyway, back to the roster. It’s awesome. These are the four lines that practiced yesterday:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen

Jost-Kadri-Burakovsky

Nieto-Compher-Donskoi

Calvert-Bellemare-Nichushkin

Now, I predicted that top-6. I didn’t think Matthew Nieto would make the third line over Colin Wilson, but Wilson does appear to be the odd-man out here. I had thought Nieto would be on the fourth line in the spot currently occupied by Valeri Nichushkin, whom I didn’t think would make the team.

It’s a little disheartening to see none of the young guys made the forwards roster. Besides Wilson, the other odd-man out is Vladislav Kamenev. At least he gets to stay with the NHL team.

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Naturally, it’s fantastic to see Mikko Rantanen back on his top line. He’s had three practices with the team now, and he’s playing with his old cohorts. He should be fine.

Now, if you’re craving youth, you’re going to find it in the defensive corps. As of right now, that corps consists of a top pairing made up of Sam Girard (21) and Cale Makar (20). It will also include Nikita Zadorov (24) and — yay! — Conor Timmins (21).

The old guy of the group is the captain of the blueline, Erik Johnson (31). It also looks good that Ryan Graves (24) will be Timmins’ partner because Jared Bednar likes him on the penalty kill:

"“Ryan Graves is the first guy that comes to mind for me. He’s got a great willingness to block shots and get himself in the right position to make defensive plays. I see him a lot like Nemeth was for us last year.”"

That leaves Mark Barberio as the odd-man out on the blueline.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Timmins making the opening night roster. I didn’t expect that. I thought the team would want him to have some time in the AHL after missing a full season with lingering concussion symptoms.

Timmins just made it too hard for the Avs to send him down. Instead, they waived their summer acquisition, Kevin Connauton, to send him to the Colorado Eagles.

Two things about that situation. One, why did they trade Carl Soderberg for Connauton just to send him down to the AHL? Two, I’ve got to think the broken facial bone was the fly in his ointment. He was off all preseason because of the fishbowl he had to wear.

Philipp Grubauer, unsurprisingly, will be the starting goalie, and rookie Pavel Frnacouz is his backup.

dark. Next. Bold Predictions for the 2019-20 Season

This is a fantastic roster for the Colorado Avalanche. They have a slick combination of speed, size, and grit with a lot of youth and just enough veteran leadership. They can play the new style of NHL hockey while still delivering the tough aspects of the sport we all love.

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