Chumps to champs: Avs' mile-high journey to the Stanley Cup
Just five years ago, Colorado was the worst team in the NHL and the worst of the salary-cap era to that point. But everything changed for them when they lost the 2017 NHL draft lottery
As the Colorado Avalanche skated around Amalie Arena with the Stanley Cup held over their heads Sunday night, some of them had to be thinking back to just five years ago when the seeds for this juggernaut team were planted. And like so many other championship teams in the NHL, the triumph was born of losing, losing and more losing. For sure, Jared Bednar was thinking about it. And there’s a good chance Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Gabriel Landeskog, Erik Johnson, and to a lesser extent, J.T. Compher, cast their minds back for a fleeting moment.
Bednar and all those players were a part of the 2016-17 edition of the Avalanche, better known as The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. That season, the Avalanche stumbled and bumbled their way under a rookie coach to a 22-56-4 record. Their .293 points percentage was the worst of the salary-cap era to that point and the worst a non-expansion team had posted since 1998-99, when the team on the other side of the rink, the dethroned two-time Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning, finished last. At one point during that season, the Avalanche won just four of 30 games and in December, lost 10-1 to the Montreal Canadiens. Artturi Lehkonen, who scored the Cup-winning goal in Game 6, had one of the Canadiens’ 10 goals.
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