Colorado Avalanche sensation Nathan MacKinnon was in scintillating form last season. He helped himself to the Rocket Richard Trophy after outscoring every other player in the NHL with 53 goals, while his beloved Avs also claimed the Presidents' Trophy after sweeping all before them throughout the course of the regular season.
His team had scored more goals per game than anyone left in the playoffs — 4.11 a night, tops in the field — and somewhere in the second period of a Conference Finals Game 4 that ended their season, they'd gone 14:23 without putting a single shot on Carter Hart. Not a bad shot. Not a blocked shot. Nothing. How does the best offensive team in hockey do that?
Because that's what this Colorado team was heading into the Western Conference Finals: the best team in hockey, full stop. Nine straight playoff appearances, a Presidents' Trophy, and a first two rounds that weren't so much won as they were bulldozed — a sweep of the Kings, a five-game dispatching of the Wild, an 8-1 combined record that had Avalanche fans already pencilling in a heavyweight clash against the Carolina Hurricanes with the biggest prize in the game on the line. Vegas, by contrast, had scraped their way through, edging out both the wildcard Utah Mammoth and the Pacific Division three-seed Minnesota Wild in six.
They fired their own coach in March and looked every bit like a team playing with house money. Then Mark Stone scored on a breakaway 4:42 into Game 1, and everything Colorado thought it knew about this series started to unravel.
The Curse Strikes Again
Vegas took the opener 4-2. Game 2, the second straight game on home ice no less, went to the Golden Knights 3-1. Game 3 was the gut-punch — Colorado up three goals in the third period, only to watch Vegas storm back and steal it 5-3 in a game the Avalanche had led wire-to-wire until they didn't. By Game 4, Cale Makar was back from injury, but Valeri Nichushkin wasn't, sidelined with a lower-body issue, and Mackenzie Blackwood got the net over Scott Wedgewood.
It didn't matter. Stone scored again. Cole Smith deflected home what stood as the series-clinching goal. Carter Hart made 20 saves, most of them looking almost bored doing it, and Colorado's desperate third-period push — a Gabriel Landeskog goal that cut it to 2-1 — arrived about ten minutes too late. Final: 2-1 Vegas, series: a sweep. Colorado became just the second team in NHL history to win the Presidents' Trophy and get swept in the same postseason. That's the wreckage this whole conversation starts from.
But despite all of that, there were, of course, positives. MacKinnon is the obvious one, as is the Presidents' Trophy, curse and all. But another is the fact that the 2025-26 season was Colorado's ninth straight postseason appearance, the joint longest in the entire NHL. And online betting sites expect that run to continue in 2026-27. The latest odds from Sportaza online sportsbook make the Avs a mightily short -1600 shot to reach the postseason for a tenth straight year next season, the shortest odds in the league by some distance.
So, who joins the Avalanche on the list of longest active NHL postseason streaks? Let's take a look.
Colorado Avalanche — 9 Seasons
A year before MacKinnon arrived as a spritely 21-year-old with the first overall pick of the 2013 NHL Draft, the Avalanche was a 48-point team going nowhere. He immediately fired his new side into the playoffs at the first time of asking, and while three straight playoff misses followed, by the time Jared Bednar's group snuck into the 2018 playoffs on the final night of the season and got bounced by Nashville in the first round — you could already see the building blocks falling into place.
Makar showed up the next year, Colorado won its first series since 2008, and by 2022, it was hoisting the Cup, beating Tampa Bay 4-2 with Makar taking home the Conn Smythe. Three of the four years since have ended earlier than hoped, and now the roster's been gutted for cap room — Nichushkin, Ross Colton, and Jack Drury all shipped out after Makar's record-setting $163.2 million extension, replaced on the fly by 34-year-old Jaden Schwartz.
The stars are still there. The depth behind them isn't. But still, a playoff miss next season would be a shocker.
Tampa Bay Lightning — 9 Seasons
Nobody talks about the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning enough. Sixty-two wins, a franchise record, the Presidents' Trophy — and then Columbus swept them in the first round like it was nothing. That humiliation is the whole engine of what came next: two Cups in the bubble, a third straight Final in 2022. Since then, four straight first-round exits, the last a seven-game collapse against Montreal despite Nikita Kucherov's Hart Trophy and Andrei Vasilevskiy's Vezina. John Carlson and Ilya Mikheyev are in now; Nicholas Paul and Taylor Raddysh are gone. The talent's never been the problem.
Carolina Hurricanes — 8 Seasons
Seven straight years, Carolina won its opening series and then died in the deeper rounds — 1-12 across three separate conference finals. Say that number out loud. Then picture this spring: sweeping Ottawa, sweeping Philadelphia, 8-0 to open the postseason, thumping Montreal 4-1 in the Conference Finals before outlasting Vegas in six, with 37-year-old Jordan Staal becoming the oldest Conn Smythe winner ever. First title since 2006 secured. Eric Tulsky kept the core intact this summer, losing only Frederik Andersen, and Carolina enters the new campaign as the favourite to go back-to-back.
Edmonton Oilers — 7 Seasons
Two straight trips to the Final in 2024 and 2025. Both lost to Florida. One blown after rallying from 3-0 down only to go on and lose Game 7. Then this spring's first-round exit to Anaheim, and Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl standing in front of cameras admitting the group had regressed — not a coach's excuse, their own words.
Kris Knoblauch is gone. Mike Babcock is in, after Vegas refused to even let them talk to John Tortorella. Darnell Nurse is in San Jose. Andersen, fresh off a Cup, is now Edmonton's goalie. Will that be enough to propel them back to genuine Cup contention? It's unlikely, but their postseason streak will surely extend to eight seasons in a year's time.
Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.
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