Colorado Avalanche cap space after uneventful free agency
How much cap space do the Colorado Avalanche have as of early September?
As a team that just won the Stanley Cup, the Colorado Avalanche did lost a couple of players in free agency that chose to get paid by another team. The biggest player on the move was the most recent in Nazem Kadri.
The Avalanche just were not able to offer enough money to get Kadri to stay. Instead, he went to Canada and signed with the Calgary Flames for a $7 million AAV deal.
That simply was too much for the Avalanche. Unfortunately, the Avs have just $3.190 million in cap space—significantly less than the annual average value that Kadri received.
Colorado signed several players this offseason, including giving goaltender Alexandar Georgiev (acquired in a trade with the New York Rangers) an extension. Georgiev now counts $3.4 million against the cap, which is $1.4 million more than the team’s other goalie on the roster, Pavel Francouz.
At the end of the day, if general manager Chris MacFarland wanted to get something done with Kadri, and if Joe Sakic (who was general manager at the time) wanted to keep Darcy Kuemper at the price tag he was at at the time, it would have been done.
Potential salary cap rise doesn’t help Colorado Avalanche much…
The current list of unrestricted free agents for the Colorado Avalanche for the 2023 offseason is as follows:
- Nathan MacKinnon
- J.T. Compher
- Andrew Cogliano
- Darren Helm
- Lukas Sedlak
- Erik Johnson
- Andreas Englund
MacKinnon will command quite a bit of money but it’s obviously unknown what his AAV will look like until that situation starts to come to a conclusion.
The salary cap, after spending a few years at the same $81.5 million, was increased by just $1 million for the upcoming season. In fact, the expectation appears to be that over the next several years, the salary cap will be increasing by increments of $1 million.
Having just won the Stanley Cup, the Avalanche might have gotten lucky in terms of free agents leaving for a new team to get paid. Hopefully they will be able to come to terms with their big stars in the near future without any hassle.