The Colorado Avalanche's Star Power Is Unmatched — Maybe Ever
With Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Martin Nečas all on historic trajectories, Colorado has assembled a top-end trio the salary-cap era was supposed to prevent.
Hockey superteams weren’t supposed to exist anymore in the NHL’s salary-cap era, which theoretically leveled the playing surface talent-wise between rich and poor teams, big and small markets, and so forth. If the cap worked as intended, the best clubs wouldn’t be able to hoard great players on their rosters without having to make huge sacrifices.
But after a real trend toward leaguewide parity that lasted from the post-lockout half of the 2000s through most of the 2010s, we started to see juggernauts emerge again as challengers for records like the 1996 Detroit Red Wings’ 62 wins and the 1977 Montreal Canadiens’ 132 points. First came the 2019 Tampa Bay Lightning and their record-tying win tally; then, the 2023 Boston Bruins shattered both that mark and the points record. Now it feels like every few years, we get one of these loaded teams where everything clicks, and suddenly the ceiling looks exactly like it did before the cap ever existed.
The latest of those is this year’s Colorado Avalanche squad — and while it might not end up breaking the Bruins’ records, it does have one of the strongest collections of high-end talent assembled on a single roster we’ve ever seen.
We’ll start with center Nathan MacKinnon, the 2024 Hart Trophy winner as league MVP who, with apologies to Connor McDavid and the rest of the NHL, might just own the sickest combination of speed, agility, hands and shooting release in the sport today:
MacKinnon has been a highly dominant player for a while now; he actually has the most Goals Above Replacement (GAR) in the league since the start of the 2022-23 season, at 94.5 — better than McDavid (92.5) or Leon Draisaitl (87.3) among skaters or Connor Hellebuyck (93.2) between the pipes. But this year, he’s on pace for a career-best adjusted GAR tally of 40.6, which would vie with the peak years of Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr’s careers as the best seasons by non-goalies in NHL history:
But MacKinnon isn’t the only Colorado star having a historic 2025-26 campaign. Notice that defenseman Cale Makar also shows up on the list above on pace for the best season by a blueliner not named “Orr” in league history. Makar is a multi-time Norris Trophy winner as the league’s best D-man — and the defending winner of the award — as well as the game’s most productive at the position by GAR since 2021-22 (with 111.4, miles better than No. 2 Quinn Hughes’ total of 83.4), but even by his standards this season has been a banner one for the 27-year-old with an insane mix of skating, stamina and skill in his own right:
Because of this, the Avalanche own the two best players in the league this season by GAR, building on what is a historic forward-defenseman pairing the game hasn’t really seen since perhaps Gretzky and Paul Coffey on the high-flying, 1980s-era Edmonton Oilers — if not earlier. Their 74.9 adjusted GAR as a two-man combination of teammates is on pace to rank second among any pair of skaters on the same roster in a single season in NHL history, trailing only Orr and Phil Esposito (who combined for 76.6 adjusted GAR) on the 1971 Boston Bruins:
But wait, there’s more! As if MacKinnon and Makar weren’t enough, the Avs also have another of the league’s Top 5 players in GAR this season, in the form of forward Martin Nečas.
Nečas was seen as something of a consolation prize for the Avalanche in the first of two blockbuster Mikko Rantanen trades last season that sent Colorado’s erstwhile No. 3 star to Carolina. Yes, he was one of the driving forces behind the Hurricanes’ status as a perennial contender, but Rantanen had outproduced Nečas in GAR during each of their previous NHL seasons, and figured to do so going forward. Playing alongside the Avs’ other talented stars, though, Nečas has found a totally new level of stardom this year — actually leapfrogging Rantanen in value to start the 2025-26 season:
The Colorado trio of MacKinnon, Makar and Nečas, then, is currently playing at a level not seen by a set of teammates in NHL history. At their current pace, their 103.6 combined Adjusted GAR would beat out Orr, Esposito and winger Ken Hodge on the 1971 Bruins as the best season by a trio of skaters on the same team in NHL history:
Despite all of this, the Avs are still not tracking to make a big dent in the 2023 Bruins, 2019 Lightning or 1996 Red Wings’ records quite yet. In the Elo forecast, they’re a toss-up to reach 120 points, much less challenge or break the 130 mark like those other teams did. We’re only now reaching the 30-game mark in the schedule, so there’s a lot of regular season left to sustain their dominance over if the Avalanche want to solidify that kind of a year.
Also to that point, Colorado’s hyper-productive trio will probably come back down to earth at least a bit by season’s end. (Nečas’ shooting percentage, currently north of 21 percent, is way out of step with his previous career rate of 12 percent, for instance.) And for all of their top-end performances — which also include good seasons in net from Scott Wedgewood and Mackenzie Blackwood, plus all-around support from proven veterans Artturi Lehkonen, Brent Burns and Brock Nelson — Colorado is still working to rebuild the depth that got stripped away from 2022’s Cup-winning squad, which legitimately ranks as one of the best in history.
Even in a salary-cap era built for parity, though, Colorado is proving it’s possible to assemble more transcendent stars than any roster has a right to possess. And if they can keep it rolling, the Avs’ top-heavy talent might just be enough to skate them into the same rarefied territory as the greatest superteams the league has ever known.