The Colorado Avalanche continue to lead the NHL this season, entering Tuesday night’s tilt with the Seattle Kraken. They are winners of 23 games through 32 outings, and have the most points of any team in the league, with 53. To put that into perspective, the next closest team is the Stars, who have 47.
With that in mind, it’s safe to assume that the Avalanche lead in a ton of categories this year. Other than the power play, it’s mostly true. One area that I’m not sure the majority of fans take into account is the time in which a team leads. Not only per game, but overall minutes this season.
While the Avalanche have won 17 of their 32 games by more than one goal, one of the biggest indications of the team’s greatness is that they have 15 games in which they’ve scored more than three goals and won. Another big indications of their greatness is the fact that they can sometimes score at will, as evidenced by their eight games of five or more goals. That’s just insane.
They also have a points percentage of .828 percent. They have two points for each regulation victory, and although they have lost every overtime/shootout game they’ve played this season, they still earned one point for each of those instances.
Once they figure out how to score consistently on power plays, you can forget about any doubts fans may have going forward. It’s hard to find a lot of faults of this team, as the elephant in the room is definitely the power play percentage. The Avalanche are near the bottom of the league at 15.3 percent The team is atop the league in penalty kill percentage, however, at 85.7 percent.
The biggest eye-opener of them all shows the Colorado Avalanche’s dominance this season
Per Natural Stat Trick, the Avalanche are dominating in a lot of categories, but one of them is the biggest eye-opener. They have played 1,920 minutes of regulation this year, and have led an impressive 1055:32 minutes. That equates to 54.9 percent.
In comparison, the next-closest team to the Avalanche in that category is the Washington Capitals, who have led just over 807 minutes this season. Of their 1,920 minutes played, they’ve led 42 percent of their time. The team that is last in minutes led are the Seattle Kraken, with just 337:32.
One issue that teams can fall victim to is that once you pull ahead in a game, you tend to start backing off and not trying as hard. Thankfully, the Avalanche haven’t done that a lot this season. There hasn’t been many games where even a small lead has made me nervous. I have a lot of confidence in the Colorado Avalanche this season, and they aren’t letting me nor any other fan down very often.