The Colorado Avalanche open the 2025-26 season on October 7, as they travel west to face the Los Angeles Kings for their season opener. It won’t be long before they head back to Ball Arena, though. They’ll get to face one of their biggest opponents of the season almost immediately.
Following their home opener against the Utah Mammoth on October 9, the Avalanche will wait until the 11th to welcome Mikko Rantanen and the Dallas Stars into town for their first of four regular season meetings. The two teams will square off in the preseason, but that won’t feature their big stars. Rantanen was traded to the Carolina Hurricanes by the Avalanche, but then traded back into the Central Division to the Stars.
He was a thorn in the Avalanche’s side, and while that chapter is over with, a new one begins.
The big storyline here is that the Avalanche will get to try and get revenge on Rantanen, who had five goals and seven assists against his former team in the 2025 postseason. While it’s been two months since the Avalanche lost in Game 6 against Dallas, it still stings a little bit. Their focus will quickly shift to the Stars and Rantanen once they take care of business in their first two games.
Colorado finished 2-1 against Dallas during the 2024-25 regular season. I believe that this upcoming season will be quite different, not in terms of the outcome of each game, but the fact that the Stars have a new head coach, and several new players. There’s going to be a fire in the hearts of the Avalanche players. While they have to move past their postseason failure of last year, the players who are still with the team who played in that series have not forgotten about that series loss.
The Avalanche have to figure out a way to contain Rantanen in the 2025-26 season. Though it matters how Rantanen got the goals in that postseason series, the fact that the Avalanche were in those situations stings. They can’t allow the same things to happen again.
The matchups will be primarily the same in terms of who Rantanen will likely square up against. It will be fun to see Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog possibly in puck battles against their former teammate. Heck, even Cale Makar could join in that fun. While there end results are what is going to matter, the matchups are always fun to look into.
Additionally, it wouldn’t surprise me a whole lot if the two teams square off in the postseason again. That’s when containing Rantanen and other stars on Dallas will matter most. Either the Avalanche will face the Winnipeg Jets, or go back and forth between Colorado and Dallas in the first round series. Unless, of course, one or more of those three teams doesn’t even clinch a playoff spot, which I would be pretty surprised about.