If the injury-plagued Avalanche rallies from an 0-2 series deficit to eliminate the Dallas Stars, Colorado general manager Joe Sakic and his staff should get the much-deserved credit.
Players win games, but setting the team up for success is on Sakic and his right-hand man, Chris MacFarland, among others. Sakic is a Hockey Hall of Fame inductee but MacFarland’s name cannot be found on any database of junior, college, or professional players.
Despite the massive difference in their hockey backgrounds, Sakic and MacFarland make a great team.
Thanks to them, the Avs have great depth, and without it, they wouldn’t even be in these playoffs — let alone among the eight teams still playing.
Colorado coach Jared Bednar, despite his team’s three days off since Game 3, said he will again be without four key players in Sunday’s Game 4. But the injuries to goalie Philipp Grubauer, defensemen Erik Johnson and forwards Matt Calvert and Joonas Donskoi won’t cause panic. All season, the Avs have found ways to win while some of their best players were unavailable at the same time. And they plan on doing that again.
“We know we’re good enough to win,” star center Nathan MacKinnon said Saturday of the Avs’ injury-depleted lineup. “Obviously, having those injured guys (in the lineup) would help. We were hurt all season. We don’t want to be hurt but we have no choice than to put our best foot forward and hope those guys get healthy, (and) if we can win this series we can get them back in later rounds. So we got to get through this round. Down 2-1, it’s a huge one Sunday.”
The four replacements who began the playoffs as healthy scratches or backups were drafted (forward Tyson Jost), acquired by trade (defenseman Kevin Connauton) or signed via free agency (goalie Pavel Francouz and forward Logan O’Connor). And they each spent time with the Avs’ American Hockey League affiliate, the Colorado Eagles in Loveland.
The Eagles, in their second year as the Avs’ AHL affiliate, are run by Avalanche assistant general manager Craig Billington, another unsung hero of the organization.
“Moving our affiliation up the road (from Denver) was one of the best choices I think our organization has made,” Bednar said Saturday. “Everyone’s kind of on the same page when it comes to the way we want to play as an organization, the structure of our game, although they have a little bit of a different makeup, I just feel like that’s been a home run.
“Some of the depth players we’ve gotten out of there over the last couple years — credit to the coaches and their hard work — they’ve come up, been ready to play and have helped us win hockey games.”
Sakic should be a candidate to win the Jim Gregory General manager of the Year Award, which is voted on by 10 print and broadcast media and all 31 GMs. He should be a shoo-in if the Avs rally to eliminate the Stars, because the award is voted on at the end of the second round of the playoffs.
Two areas of the Avalanche have been consistent throughout this season: Injuries and winning.
Without this kind of depth, winning wouldn’t be as frequent, and the Avs wouldn’t be in a position to advance to the Western Conference finals.
Footnote. Bednar said defenseman Nikita Zadorov, who didn’t play in the third period of Game 3 because of injury, practiced Saturday and should be in the lineup Sunday.