The Colorado Avalanche are built to chase a Stanley Cup right now, and that approach has a very real cost: a prospect pool that doesn’t feature a single top-100 name.
That absence showed up in a recent Athletic ranking of the top 100 drafted prospects ahead of the 2026-27 season. None of those players belonged to Colorado, and for this organization, that’s not exactly a surprise.
The Avalanche have spent years pushing their chips in. Since the rough stretch of the early 2010s, they haven’t had many chances to draft near the top of the board. The 2013 first-overall pick brought in Nathan MacKinnon, and other premium picks delivered Gabriel Landeskog, Mikko Rantanen, and Cale Makar.
But once the team settled into its late-2010s and early-2020s push, the draft strategy changed with it. A perennial playoff team usually means picking later in the first round and living in the middle of the prospect range, and that’s exactly where Colorado has been.
Those players aren’t busts. They’re just not MacKinnon or Makar.
The Avalanche have still found useful young talent, but a lot of that talent has been used as currency to add proven veterans. Calum Ritchie became Brock Nelson, and Max Curran was moved for Nazem Kadri.
Would Ritchie and Curran have been franchise pillars? Probably not. They could have helped a rebuilding team, but they weren’t the kind of foundational pieces that define a core the way MacKinnon and Makar do.
That’s why Colorado’s lack of elite prospects looks less like a problem and more like a consequence of how the roster has been built. The Avalanche will need to keep squeezing value out of their draft picks, wherever they land.
This offseason offered a glimpse of that with Egor Shilov in the second round and Beckett Hamilton in the third round. Both have a chance to develop into useful support players, though even that kind of progress could eventually make them attractive trade pieces if Colorado wants to keep its contention window open for another half-decade.
At some point, the bill for all this winning-now behavior will come due. As MacKinnon and Makar get older, a rebuild becomes more of a possibility. That makes it even more important for the Avalanche to keep stacking potential replacement players, and that process could already be starting this season.
For Colorado, the goal is clear: avoid the kind of long slide that leads to a decade in the wilderness. Those days are behind them, and the next phase will be about deciding how long the club can keep this run going without losing sight of what comes after.
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Avalanche Fans Have Every Reason To Watch Connor Hellebuyck Now
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For Colorado, the appeal is easy to understand. A goalie of Hellebuycks caliber could alter the balance of the Central Division and, in turn, the road through the Western Conference for a club trying to keep its Stanley Cup window open. Nothing is settled yet, but the possibility alone is enough to make this one worth watching closely. [Read more 🡒]
Avalanche Fans Still Feel The Pain Of This Franchise Changing Draft Miss
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For Avalanche fans, the frustration is sharpened by how much the organization has had to live with the ripple effects since then, from the roster to the bench. A better outcome in that draft might have changed more than one player development track, and maybe even the coaching timeline, which is part of why the pain lingers even with brighter chapters that came later. [Read more 🡒]
Avalanche Fans May Never Get Over This Kadri What If
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Now Nichushkin is gone too, shipped to the Blue Jackets earlier this offseason, and the whole sequence only sharpens the sense that Colorado may have been one choice away from a very different last few seasons. The Avalanche can still point to the talent they assembled and the title they already own, but the way those contracts and transactions unfolded has left a lingering what if around Kadri, one that will keep hanging over the roster as the next season offers another look at how this group functions without the pieces it once moved on from. [Read more 🡒]