The Colorado Avalanche were dealt a bad hand with injuries this season, but one of their recent returnees has previously made a huge impact on their top line this season, before being placed on injured reserve for over a month.
Due to early-season struggles, not only with injuries, but with overall performance, Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar decided to shake things up at various spots on the team’s depth chart. The biggest change was placing a third-line Roaring 20’s line player at the top alongside Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen. That player was Ross Colton.
Colton played in 10 games at the beginning of the season and recorded eight goals and one assist before going down for a while with a broken foot. He had 37 shots in those 10 games, with a shooting percentage of 20 percent.
Not only that, however. The line of Colton, MacKinnon and Rantanen has accounted for an expected-goals percentage (xGoals %) of 70.3. That number ranks seventh in the entire league. Given that there are 128 offensive lines combines in the NHL, ranking seventh in this category is tremendous. It’s also not surprising.
I understand the idea that Bednar has with splitting successful players up and moving one to another line, but we’re literally talking about the top line, and one of the best first lines—if not the best—in all of the NHL.
Thankfully, when announcing Colton’s return to the team, Bednar expressed his intention to eventually put Colton back on the top line. It would have been concerning, in my opinion, to not make this move. Even though he hadn’t played for a while, getting him back on the line that he succeeded on the most is the right call.
We’ll see how many games he’ll play before officially heading back there, and it might be that his foot isn’t entirely healed yet—just enough to get his groove back—his feet wet, if you will. I’m eager to see the move happen whenever it does, but we all know that you cannot rush things, especially injuries to a foot.