Trade with the Avalanche at your own risk

Since being hired as general manager of the Colorado Avalanche prior to the 2013-14 season Joe Sakic has steadily put together one of the NHL’s best and most talented teams. On Monday, they completed a four-game sweep of the Edmonton Oilers to punch their ticket to the organization’s first Stanley Cup Final since the 2000-01 season. It has them just four wins away from the championship that will validate all of the hype that has been built over the past five years around this core group of players.

The foundation of that core has mostly been built through the drafts, with superstars like Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Cale Makar being selected with top-10 picks, and emerging stars like Bowen Byram and Alex Newhook coming in recent years.

That has been the foundation of the team.

But no contender and no Stanley Cup team is built on just three or four players. You have to complement those stars through development, free agency, and trades. It is the latter category where Sakic and the Avalanche have really dominated the NHL in recent years. They not only find good players in their deals, they make deals where they turn out to be clear winners.

The first three or four years of Sakic’s tenure as general manager brought a lot of mixed results on the ice and in their roster transactions. There were a lot of inconsequential trades, and one major trade (Ryan O'Reilly to Buffalo) that did not really bring much or make much of a difference. J.T. Compher is still a good player from that O’Reilly deal, but the overall return was mostly underwhelming.

Things started to rapidly change on Nov. 5, 2017. At that point the Avalanche had a promising young core led by MacKinnon, but had missed the playoffs three years in a row, in