The Colorado Avalanche have been around since the 1995-96 season (not counting their days as the Quebec Nordiques. Thankfully, Avs Faithful has gotten to witness three Stanley Cup victories. But, it could have been more if one particular move had happened.
While it had been over 13 years since their last Stanley Cup victory to the 2014 season, what happened months before that year may have cost the Avalanche another trophy.
It was the 2014 NHL Draft. The Avalanche had the 23rd overall pick in the first round. Up to that point, there had been some great selections made by other teams, as evidenced by their overall numbers as of today. The first four picks were Aaron Ekblad, Sam Reinhart, Leon Draisaitl and Sam Bennett. Nikolaj Ehlers, William Nylander and Dylan Larkin are a couple more names you would have heard of who went earlier in the draft.
With the 23rd overall pick, the Colorado Avalanche selected Conner Bleackley, a center from Red Deer, Alberta.
Bleackley never made it to the NHL. In fact, only one player out of seven taken by the Avalanche played at least one game in the NHL—Anton Lindholm. While it took him a couple of years to make it to the NHL, he played for the Avalanche from 2016-17 to 2019-20 in various numbers of games per season.
It was an historically bad draft class for the Avalanche, but what makes it even worse is who was selected two spots after Bleackley. That was David Pastrnak. Pastrnak, to this day, has established himself in the NHL. He only spent parts of two seasons (25 games and three games respectively) with the Bruins’ AHL team from Providence. Other than that small number of games, he’s been an NHL regular.
I’m not going to sit here and suggest that the Avalanche would have been a successful team in 2015-16 if they took Pastrnak. However, that could be the case for several years that followed. Maybe, if Colorado made that draft choice instead of Bleackley, the success of the team would have been strong enough to convince Patrick Roy to continue coaching the Avalanche.
Maybe Pastrnak would have been a big part of the team’s offensive unit alongside MacKinnon. After that particular draft, the Avalanche spent the next seven seasons building up to finally make the Stanley Cup Final in 2021-22.
After several torturous seasons, where they finished without qualifying for the postseason in the next three years following the 2014 Draft, they haven’t missed the postseason since.
It is unfortunate that they have only one Stanley Cup to show for their rebuild and MVP-calibre play by several different players. Perhaps Pastrnak could have helped the team get to the promised land at least one more time.
The Cale Makar effect
On the other side of the coin, the Avalanche likely would not have gotten a crack at drafting superstar defenseman Cale Makar if their 2016-17 season went better. Selected fourth overall in the lottery section of that class, Makar has been outstanding and widely regarded as the league’s best defenseman.
As they say, things happen for a reason. Whether that’s true for everything is up for debate, but not right now. The fact is that the Avalanche exited the 2016-17 draft with the best defenseman in the class, and the fact that the Dallas Stars seleted Miro Heiskanen the pick before Makar went puts a smile on Avs fans’ faces.
That’s not a knock on Heiskanen. It’s just that we are so grateful for Makar.
What could have been with Pastrnak on the Avalanche will remain only in the thoughts of Avalanche fans, though. Even though they have only gotten one Stanley Cup out of this crew, having Makar dominate the league has been so much fun to watch.
We won’t get to find out what would have actually happened if the Avs selected Pastrnak, but it has been fun taking a look at maybe what would have happened.
While their first-round selection of Nathan MacKinnon the year prior is the best first-round selection in team history, the first-round move they made the year after turned out to be the worst they’ve ever made.
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