The Avs and Stars Meet Again — Just Like Old Times
Before it was a marquee first-round matchup, Colorado versus Dallas was a power struggle that helped define an era of NHL history.
There are plenty of fun and/or exciting series to track in Round 1 of the 2025 NHL playoffs, including the Battle of Ontario, the Battle of Florida (again) and the Battle of Gretzky (again and again and again and again).
But let’s be honest: The most anticipated battle of Round 1 is, on paper at least, the Colorado Avalanche versus the Dallas Stars — the teams ranked No. 2 and No. 6, respectively, in my Elo ratings. (Yes, Jason Robertson is hurt and the Avs dominated Game 1 on Saturday night; Game 2 is tonight in Dallas.)
The NHL’s playoff format, which pits the second- and third-place teams in each division against each other, has a penchant for burning through marquee matchups far earlier than it probably should. And because the Central Division was particularly strong this year, we’re getting a potential conference-finals type of series right out of the gate — meaning one legitimate Stanley Cup contender is guaranteed to bow out before Round 2.
As former Stars play-by-play man (and my fellow Substacker)
noted a few days ago, however, this is far from the first big playoff showdown between these two franchises. In fact, I would venture this may not even be the best first-round series between Dallas and Colorado in playoff history. From 1999 to 2006, the two teams faced off in the postseason four times, including twice in Round 1 (and twice in the Western Conference final). Playing in the NHL’s pre-salary cap era, those rosters were insanely star-packed, from Joe Sakic and Mike Modano1 to Sergei Zubov and Ray Bourque.The battles back then were symbolic of an era that, while deeply flawed, also gave us some of the most intense playoff rivalries in hockey history — the kind of drama we’d be lucky to see even more of in today’s game.
We can measure both the quality and star power in a series by looking at two separate, but related, measures: First, the minimum Elo rating of the two teams going into Game 1 — ensuring that both teams were operating at a high level in the moment — and the minimum average career-to-date Goals Above Replacement (GAR) for the two teams’ rosters through that regular season, weighted by how many GAR they had during the season in question.2 Here’s a plot of every NHL playoff series in the Round of 16 or later3 from 1980-2024, plus Avs-Stars from 2025, with highlights on matchups involving either Dallas, Colorado or (preferably) both:
As we can see, disproportionate number of the best and most star-studded matchups in modern playoff history featured the Avalanche and Stars, either against each other or someone else. This 2025 series is in that discussion, to be sure, especially when it comes to Round 1, but it is not quite the best of a rivalry that seemed to put the two franchises on a collision course almost every year.
In fact, calling it a rivalry might be understating things. If we also include the Detroit Red Wings in the mix — sadly absent from this year’s playoffs, but a force in an earlier era of the game — it was more of a power struggle that helped to define an entire period of NHL history.
From 1995 through 2002, the Western Conference was essentially controlled by those three franchises, Colorado, Dallas and Detroit. In that eight-season stretch, at least one member of that trio appeared in the West final every single year — and in all but two of those seasons, two of the three were battling each other to reach the Stanley Cup Final. Whether it was the Avs and Red Wings during their legendary blood feud or the Avalanche and Stars colliding in back-to-back seven-game conference finals in 1999 and 2000, this was a time when the path to the Cup always ran through a small ruling class of elite teams:
Detroit’s rise to the top — aided by the fabled Russian Five — is a fascinating topic for its own separate post. But Dallas and Colorado’s clashes followed equally intriguing paths for both franchises.
The Avalanche juggernaut had roots nearly 2,000 miles away, forming in Quebec out of the vestiges of an early-’90s Nordiques team that was one of the worst in hockey history — but one that had recently drafted Sakic, Mats Sundin, Adam Foote and others… and would soon add even more talent (including Peter Forsberg via trade after big drama involving Eric Lindros). While the team made the playoffs again in 1993 and 1995, it was unfortunate that Quebec City never got to see the peak of the burgeoning dynasty that GMs Maurice Filion, Pierre Pagé and Pierre Lacroix built, before financial struggles forced the Nords to relocate to Colorado in ‘95.
At the same time, the (North) Stars weren’t in too dissimilar a situation themselves. I dug into the franchise’s path from Minnesota to Dallas in detail here — but the quick summary is that, despite making a surprise Stanley Cup Final run in 1991, the North Stars struggled with low attendance and arena problems in Bloomington, ultimately prompting unpopular owner Norm Green to uproot the team and relocate it to Dallas in 1993.
Like the Avalanche (née Nordiques), the now plain-old-Stars were leaving their old home with the makings of a future winner. Not only were they led by Modano, who had 33 goals and 93 points at age 22 in 1992-93, but defensive anchors Derian Hatcher, Richard Matvichuk and Craig Ludwig were already on the roster, and the team had either already drafted or would soon draft Jere Lehtinen, Jamie Langenbrunner, Marty Turco and future Hall of Famer Jarome Iginla (who never played for the Stars, but was used to deal for Joe Nieuwendyk).
Both teams kept stacking up talent in their new homes. Dallas further bolstered its D-corps by adding the offensive-minded Zubov and Darryl Sydor, then signed sniper Brett Hull, veteran power forward Pat Verbeek and future HOF goalie Ed Belfour, the perfect backstop for coach Ken Hitchcock’s defensive system. Meanwhile, Colorado traded for Patrick Roy (arguably the GOAT goalie), snagged dynamic D Sandis Ozolinsh and brought together a bunch of tough veterans — headlined by winger Claude Lemieux, by turns talented, dirty and chaotic.
In this Western conference arms race, Colorado struck first, winning the 1996 Stanley Cup after knocking off Detroit in the conference final. The Wings got their revenge over Colorado in the 1997 playoffs, and Dallas became a big factor in 1998 — pushing Detroit to six games in the WCF. That all set up 1999, when Colorado outlasted Detroit in the West semis, only to blow a 3-2 lead to the eventual champion Stars in the conference final.
In 2000, things heated up even more as new players entered the rivalry, both young (Milan Hejduk, Chris Drury, Alex Tanguay, Brenden Morrow) and old (Bourque). Once again, Colorado beat Detroit in the conference semifinals, and took an early 2-1 series lead against Dallas, but came up just short in Game 7.
The Stars ended up running out of gas in the Stanley Cup Final, and they were swept out of the 2001 second round by St. Louis while Colorado won another Cup that summer. The Red Wings roared back in a huge way in 2002, signing Hull as part of building one of the most stacked teams in hockey history; they beat Colorado in their own seven-game WCF before winning the Cup over Carolina. And that was the end of the Colorado/Dallas/Detroit stranglehold over the West; the next two conference finals were Ducks/Wild and Flames/Sharks.
After that, the 2005 NHL lockout ended this era of hockey permanently, with the cap never again allowing such deep collections of talent to be pieced together on the same roster. But that wasn’t before one more big postseason showdown between Dallas and Colorado, this time in Round 1 of the 2004 playoffs.
This one featured a couple of teams that were reloaded from the previous era of dominance — Dallas’ two best players by GAR were Bill Guerin and Jason Arnott, and who doesn’t remember the Avs’ Paul Kariya/Teemu Selanne experiment? — yet still contained names like Modano, Zubov, Sakic and Forsberg. The record will show that Colorado won the series in five games, but Games 3-4 gave us that old rivalry feeling again, with the former going to a single overtime and the latter lasting into double OT:
While the teams met again on the other side of the lockout, another 4-1 Colorado series win, things weren’t the same after that last gasp. Both teams lost to Detroit’s ongoing powerhouse in the 2008 playoffs — Colorado in the West semis, Dallas in the conference final — but neither made the ‘09 postseason field, and it took each franchise a while to return to prominence. The teams that meet now, as they also did last year, are exemplars of their own era of NHL team-building, with prototypical modern stars like Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, Robertson (when healthy) and Mikko Rantanen — who played for both squads4 this season.
If we’re lucky, this year’s first-round clash will serve as more than just a fun throwback, or a back-to-back matchup spit out by an arbitrary playoff system — it’ll be an important chapter in one of hockey’s most compelling new rivalries. (Dallas will need to show us more in Game 2 for that to be true.) But at the same time, it’s hard not to be transported back to an earlier moment in history, when the path to the Stanley Cup was practically guaranteed to run through either Dallas or Denver each year.
Think of this as measuring the stardom or career accomplishments of each player in the series, with more weight given to players who were still producing at the time.
So, excluding the 2020 Bubble’s qualifying round.
Plus Carolina.