Lessons the Colorado Rockies can take from the Colorado Avalanche

After 21 years and a legendary run that matched the most combined regular season and playoff wins in NHL history with 72 in 102 games played, the Colorado Avalanche are the 2022 Stanley Cup Champions. As the champs were saluted in front of the hometown fans Wednesday night at Coors Field, there was a question — I’m sure — in the backs of the minds of many Rockies fans: When (if ever) will the Rockies get the chance to hoist their own hard-won trophy at 20th and Blake, or will Coors Field continue to only play host to visiting champions as a mere stop on a much larger victory tour.

There is no one recipe for success and it would be foolish to think you could simply copy and paste a blueprint for winning from sport to sport and league to league. But there are lessons, no doubt, that can be learned from a champion, and the Colorado Rockies would be wise to take note.

So here are four lessons the Colorado Rockies can learn from the Colorado Avalanche.

Don’t fear the rebuild

The Rockies front office and ownership have long steered clear of the word and insisted the team was competing for a shot at a World Series title, regardless of how well the team has played in recent years. As all Rockies fans can attest, the reluctance to rebuild does not mean that the team will not lose games. It merely reflects the fact that there is no plan in place to transform the club into a team that can truly compete for a championship.

The delayed rebuild has also prevented the Rockies from at least gaining the loser’s trophy of prime draft position. While far from true contention, the Rockies have played just well enough to find themselves near the bottom of “the middle” of the league (in my opinion, the worst place for a franchise to sit). The Rockies have hung around in this purgatory for several seasons and, despite seemingly being far from contention, they have not selected in the top five of the draft since 2016 when they picked Riley Pint fourth overall. This year they will pick 10th, in 2021 they were eighth, in 2020 they were ninth, in 2019 they were 23rd, in 2018 they were 22nd, and in 2017 they lost their first-rounder when they acquired Ian Desmond.

The two picks in the early 20s in 2018 and 2019 obviously are indicative of the franchise’s only consecutive playoff berths, but with a farm system that currently ranks toward the very bottom of the league, the Rockies desperately need to replenish their prospect pool.

Often in sports, you don’t get to be good until you are bad. Just five years prior to winning the Stanley Cup, the Colorado Avalanche had one of the worst seasons in NHL history. Now they are on top. The rebuild is not a white flag. It is a blank page, a fresh start. And it is the first step in the long road to securing a championship.

Let the kids play

In the NHL, top draft picks often join their teams as teenagers. Baseball is a bit of a different animal when it comes to transitioning to the pro level compared to hockey. It often requires years of minor league development and tortuous growing pains before a high school player is ready for The Show. That being said, it is not entirely uncommon for a player to make his MLB debut at 19, 20, or 21 years old.

The question here, though, does not seem to be about age alone. For as long as I have been a fan of the Colorado Rockies (dating back to their 2007 World Series run), the organization has harbored a very odd attitude toward their top prospects. Often, they toil away on minor league rosters where they have nothing left to prove and when their chance finally comes to play at the big league level, they spend far too much time on the bench, stuck behind a logjam of veteran journeymen who receive the bulk of the playing time.

When competitive, the team will not deal top prospects to address other roster needs, but when the team is out of playoff contention, they will not give those prospects a chance to get regular MLB at-bats. Even now, players like Elehuris Montero and Ezequiel Tovar are stuck in this cycle. This season, Montero will turn 24 and Tovar will turn 21. Both are still young, but both also seem to have already gained all they can from minor league baseball. There is no excuse for a 24-year-old Montero to be in a Triple-A lineup with the sort of numbers he’s been putting up just as there’s no excuse for him to sit on a Major League bench.

Whether a team is playing well or not, they should consider the future, and for those teams that are struggling to win games, that consideration of the future should be paramount. It should be reflected in every decision made. Every move should come out of careful consideration of how it will help the team five years down the road. This is where giving a promising young prospect preference in playing time over a veteran on a short-term contract should be a no-brainer.

There will be growing pains for these players, and we can’t expect them to burst on to the scene and immediately have a major impact. But it is my opinion (and I believe the opinion of many other Rockies fans) that the trouble the Rockies have had with receiving consistent quality play from essentially every non-pitching prospect since Nolan Arenado is a dilemma of their own making and the result of disastrous prospect management in desperate need of a dramatic philosophical overhaul.

They need to take a page from the Colorado Avalanche and let the kids play.

Find outside help

Once the core was established, former Avalanche legend and current general manager Joe Sakic did not shy away from adding players via trade and free agency and, though there wasn’t a huge splash, it seemed he struck gold with every move. This is another place from which the Rockies can draw hope. Generally, the Rockies are not going to find themselves landing a big splash in the free agent or trade market, though the Kris Bryant signing stands out as a clear anomaly. They are more likely to find a lesser known player that they believe can make a surprise impact, guys like C.J. Cron, Connor Joe, and Daniel Bard. It was these kinds of under-the-radar moves that helped the Avalanche find the right depth pieces to support their core.

After unsuccessful attempts to land big names like Taylor Hall and Artemi Panarin to center Colorado’s second line, Sakic’s biggest “splash” wound up being a trade for Nazem Kadri in 2019. Not only was Kadri cheaper than Hall or Panarin but, since the trade, he’s performed far better than Hall and arguably had a better season this year than Panarin and would have been a strong candidate to win the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP had it not been for Cale Makar.

Sometimes, the best move isn’t the one that gets the most attention at the time. Joe Sakic and the Avalanche have mastered this over the last five years, whether it was the addition of Kadri, or the signing of winger Valeri Nichuskin who had been bought out by the Dallas Stars and was considering leaving the NHL only to become one of the most valuable players in the Stanley Cup Final three years later, or the laughably lopsided trade to steal defenseman Devon Toews away from the New York Islanders before he became a Norris Trophy candidate in his own right and joined Makar to form the best defensive pair in the NHL.

Part of the reason they’ve had so much success finding impact players where no one else is looking is because the Avalanche have long been on the cutting edge of analytics in the NHL. The Rockies, notably, have lagged far behind in the analytics department for years. Some investment in analytics could be monumentally transformative for this club.

Conclusion

The Avalanche showed that a rebuild doesn’t have to take forever. One year after their record-setting disaster 2016-17 season, they made the playoffs with one of the greatest single-season turnarounds in NHL history and haven’t missed the postseason since. They also showed that you don’t have to tear down the entire team to conduct a successful rebuild. Landeskog and MacKinnon were on that 2016-17 team, as was forward JT Compher. Rantanen was a rookie that year. Defenseman Erik Johnson is the longest-tenured active athlete in Colorado sports. They made trades. They took the team apart and rebuilt it. But they identified their core and left it in tact.

This is the toughest decision. Which players do you trade? Which ones do you try to build a championship team around? For the Rockies, who are the future stars of the team? Can they build around Ryan McMahon, Brendan Rodgers, and Bryant? Is Cron a core piece for the future or a trade piece who can bring in prospects to help the team down the road when their contention window begins to open once more? Is Charlie Blackmon the Rockies’ Erik Johnson, a veteran clubhouse leader who’s been through it all and continues to provide value game in and game out? Maybe the core isn’t here yet. Maybe they are knocking on the door. And if the future of this team lies in its top-performing prospects, will they let them play?

There’s no formula for guaranteed success. But the Colorado Rockies just watched the Avalanche teach the sports world a masterclass in conducting a rebuild. Perhaps, if they take a few lessons, they can win a championship of their own one day.