Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon will miss 4 weeks

The hits keep coming for the Colorado Avalanche. Literally. The team has already been missing the likes of Gabriel Landeskog, Valeri Nichushkin, Evan Rodrigues, and Darren Helm. While some of those players will be back relatively soon, the team will be without Nathan MacKinnon for some time.

MacKinnon was injured fairly early on in Monday night’s 5-3 loss against the Philadelphia Flyers. The team just was never the same without his ability to get down the ice and shoot on net.

While the team will get some players back in the coming weeks, it is becoming more and more obvious that the Colorado Avalanche will need to look at acquiring players by the trade deadline. The team just cannot rely on call-up players to have a similar impact in games that the star players have. That’s just not quite how it works.

We saw almost-instant impact by Rodrigues when he joined the Avalanche, but there’s a pretty significant difference between a veteran and a young guy.

If you’re keeping count, the Colorado Avalanche now have five of its top seven forwards banged up. The team has explored different line combinations to try and get past these injuries but it has become obvious that it’s not exactly sustainable. The team needs to do something about this.

One of the most popular topics in the NHL is where Jonathan Toews and Bo Horvat will end up if they are going to leave their team in a trade. The Avalanche have often been talked about as destinations for these two players. While we will get some of our star players back at some point, the Avalanche really should at least call about Toews and Horvat to see what the price of acquiring them would be.

They need to be proactive.

It’s a weird thing happening in Denver. The loss of Nathan MacKinnon is a big one.

UPDATE: Nathan MacKinnon will miss approximately four weeks with the upper-body injury.