One of the conversations I’ve been hearing about lately pertains to the clock beginning to tick on the Colorado Avalanche’s championship window.
On the surface, it makes sense.
The Avs will enter the 2026-27 season as one of the oldest teams in the NHL. Elite Prospects shows Colorado tipping the scales at 29.96 years old. Only the Florida Panthers and the LA Kings are actually older, as both teams top 30 years.
And that’s the central argument for the Avalanche’s closing championship window. The fact that the club’s core is well past 30, with superstar Nathan MacKinnon getting long in the tooth at 30. Meanwhile, Cale Makar, once a phenom, is now 27.
I am much older than Makar or MacKinnon. Heck, Makar could be my son, that’s young. But in NHL terms, they’re starting to reach the Precambrian period.
The team, of course, isn’t just Makar and MacKinnon. Captain Gabriel Landeskog is 33, Nazem Kadri is 35, Brock Nelson is 34, newcomer Jaden Schwartz is 34, and Brent Burns is a venerable elder statesman at 41.
That’s why pundits feel that the Avalanche don’t have much time left to win one more Stanley Cup. If the organization is dead set on winning multiple Cups before rebuilding, they had better act fast.
Avalanche wasted MacKinnon’s prime
Another argument out there is that the Avalanche wasted Nathan MacKinnon’s prime. The point lies in the club failing to win multiple Cups during the mid to late-20s of their superstar center.
There is some rationale to that argument. The 2023 playoffs are a good example of that. The Avs were coming off their 2022 Cup victory, only to get upset in the first round by the upstart Seattle Kraken.
But that wasn’t the only time the Avalanche failed to make headway. There were back-to-back second-round exits in 2020 and 2021, followed by two straight losses to the Dallas Stars in 2024 and 2025.
Those are five seasons in which the Avalanche could have skated away with at least one more Cup.
But they didn’t. That situation is what fuels the argument that Colorado wasted MacKinnon’s best years. While the missed opportunities will never return, there’s plenty of reason to think that the best is yet to come.
Colorado Still Has Time to Become a Dynasty
When talking about a dynasty, thoughts of the New York Islanders winning four straight Cups in the early 80s come to mind. There’s also the Edmonton Oilers that won five Cups in seven years.
The latter is something Colorado could still aim for. It might be pushing it a little to think that the Avalanche could still win four or five more Cups, but would three Cups in, say, six or seven years count as a dynasty?
It would be foolish to bet against the Avalanche, especially when they have two of the world’s top 10 players regardless of position.
That’s why the 2026-27 season will be a crucial one for the Avalanche. Anything short of a Stanley Cup victory will not suffice. Considering the uber-talented team set to hit the ice, it’s Cup or Bust.
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