The Colorado Avalanche have had plenty of draft hits since arriving in Denver in 1995-96, but one choice from 2014 still stands out for all the wrong reasons.
With the 23rd pick in that first round, the Avalanche took Conner Bleackley, a center from Red Deer, Alberta. Bleackley never reached the NHL.
Of the seven players Colorado selected in that draft, only one appeared in at least one NHL game: Anton Lindholm. Lindholm needed a couple of years to get there, then played for the Avalanche from 2016-17 through 2019-20 in varying workloads each season.
That draft class was rough enough on its own. What makes it sting even more is who went just two picks later: David Pastrnak.
Pastrnak has become a fixture in the NHL, spending only brief stretches with the Bruins’ AHL team in Providence before settling in as a regular at the top level. He logged 25 games there in one season and three in another, and that was basically the extent of his minor-league detour.
It’s easy to look back and wonder how different things might have been if Colorado had made the other call. The source doesn’t go so far as to say Pastrnak alone would have turned the Avalanche into a champion in 2015-16, but it does leave room for the idea that he could have shaped several seasons that followed.
Maybe he would have given Nathan MacKinnon another major weapon on offense. Maybe the team’s trajectory would have been strong enough to keep Patrick Roy behind the bench.
Instead, Colorado spent the next seven seasons building back toward the Stanley Cup Final, which it finally reached in 2021-22. After three straight years without a playoff berth following the 2014 draft, the Avalanche have not missed the postseason since. Even so, the feeling lingers that there could have been more than one Cup in this run.
There’s another twist to the story, though. If the Avalanche’s 2016-17 season had gone better, they likely never would have had the chance to draft Cale Makar.
Colorado grabbed him fourth overall in that class, and he has since become widely viewed as the league’s best defenseman. The Stars took Miro Heiskanen one pick before Makar, and while that isn’t a knock on Heiskanen, it does make Avalanche fans smile when they think about how the board fell.
So the 2014 miss remains the painful what-if, while the 2017 result is the reason the whole thing doesn’t feel like a total disaster. Colorado may only have one Stanley Cup from this stretch, but Makar has been a showpiece player, and that has mattered.
When the Avalanche drafted MacKinnon first overall the year before, they landed the best first-round pick in franchise history. The next year, though, they made the worst first-round selection they’ve ever had.
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