How do you plan for a team as talented as the Avalanche?

Follow| Archive

How do you beat the Colorado Avalanche?  

It’s a front-of-mind question for everyone in hockey right now. That’s how much fear the Avalanche can strike into a team.

Their skater group is the deepest and most talented in hockey. If you had any reservations about that claim a week ago, the Avalanche put an exclamation point on it by sweeping the lively Edmonton Oilers to reach the Stanley Cup Final. 

When the Avalanche are playing at their best, they look superhuman. They have high-end, superstar-level talents in Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar. The bulk of the lineup plays at a pace best described as frenetic. When the Avs are humming, they put most teams through the meat grinder.

This has been a sustained trend over time. No team has been more dominant than the Avalanche than the past three seasons, and that includes the (still alive) two-time Stanley Cup champions in Tampa Bay:

So yes, the Avalanche are terrifying. And whether it’s the New York Rangers or Lightning coming out of the East, they’ll have the same question: How do you plan for a team this talented? How can you win?

A goaltending heater from Andrei Vasilevskiy or Igor Shesterkin is one path, surely. A second path is the Avalanche imploding, which we have seen before. But absent good fortune, we must look at how other teams have had success against Colorado, and what that might mean the rest of the way.

To that end, I have split Colorado’s most recent regular season based on outcomes (52 games ending in wins versus 30 games ending in a shootout or a loss) to analyze the key underlying statistical measures. Like any team, we will see in games where Colorado struggled, their shooting percentages sank, and opponent save percentages surged. What