Avalanche will enter Olympic Games break as NHL’s top team. Here’s how others finished. | Journal

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This Colorado Avalanche team wants to emulate the Detroit Red Wings of 2002, not 2006.

That’s the simplest way to look at what’s to come for the Avs. They are going to reach the NHL’s break for the 2026 Winter Olympics atop the league standings.

This will be the sixth time the NHL has stopped its season in February for its players to participate in the most prestigious international competition in the sport. It’s also the first time since 2014.

The Avs will have three weeks between Game Nos. 55 and 56. When the NHL returns to action, it will be a mad dash to the playoffs.

Colorado will feel that immediately. The Avs will play five games in seven days right out of the break. They will play in four cities, with two sets of back-to-backs.

“Five in seven nights … you think that’s good coming out of a three-week break?” Avs coach Jared Bednar said last week, beating the reporter to the numbers involved.

“I can’t say that I’m not a little bit concerned with those guys going and playing a bunch of hockey, flying back and then jumping into five in seven. I worry about injuries, but it’s either play or sit them in the stands and we don’t want to be doing that. We don’t have any choice. We play the schedule that we’re given.”

That’s not the end of the grind, either. Colorado will reach the break with among the fewest games played in the NHL. That’s nice for being able to say they have an X-point lead and three games in hand on the Minnesota Wild plus two in hand on the Dallas Stars in the Central Division, but it also means more games to be played between Feb. 25 and April 16.

The Avs will play 27 games in 51 days, to be exact.

“When it comes to strength and conditioning and making sure that our guys have as much energy as we could possibly have, we’ve been doing that since (strength and conditioning coach Alexi Pianosi) got here (in July 2024, and before that even,” Bednar said. “But it’s gotten more detailed, and I’m getting more information on that.

“I don’t know what else we can do. We’re not practicing. We’re optional for morning skates. We’ve kind of been running on that late-season mentality all year, for the most part, and that’s all we can do. We’re not going to rest guys in games, so hopefully we play well, can build some leads and we can use our whole bench and kind of manage it that way. We’ll need to be a four-line team. Everyone will have to be involved. And that’s all you can really do.”

So what does the history of teams who set the pace atop the NHL standings at the Olympic break say?

Be the 2002 Red Wings, not the 2006 edition.

Detroit, in 2002, is the only team to lead the league at the Olympic break and finish the season by lifting the Stanley Cup. Two teams — the Red Wings in 2006 and the Washington Capitals in 2010 — finished the season with the Presidents’ Trophy but abruptly crashed out of the postseason in stunning opening-round defeats.

The Dallas Stars reached the Western Conference Final in 1998 before losing to the eventual champions (Detroit). The Anaheim Ducks in 2014 also lost to the eventual Cup winners, Los Angeles, in a seven-game second-round series.

It’s a small sample size, but here’s a quick summary of how things went with each team after the break.

Dallas is the biggest cautionary tale, the worst-case scenario. The Stars went 13-9-3 after the break and held on to the top spot in the standings. But leading scorer Joe Nieuwendyk, a Canadian Olympian, tore an ACL in Game 1 of the first round. Finnish Olympian Jere Lehtinen, the Selke Trophy winner that year, also missed five playoff games.

It was a valiant run for the Stars to even reach the conference final and take the Red Wings to six games, but Nieuwendyk’s injury was too much to overcome.

The Red Wings in 2002 are the biggest reason for hope. They had 11 Olympians, more than any of the other teams that either finished first in the NHL standings or won the Cup in an Olympic year. They also lost more games than they won after the break (10-6-4-2, during the NHL’s weird four-number standings era).

Despite that, Detroit had 13 skaters and a goalie play in every playoff, had only one key figure miss time (Igor Larionov was out for five games) and the Red Wings won the championship. That was a dominant regular-season team built to win that year, and they had to go through the arch-nemesis (Colorado) to do it. Sounds … a bit like the 2026 Avalanche.

The 2006 Red Wings and the 2010 Capitals were both “goalie’d” in the first round. Only one Olympian missed a game because of injury between the two clubs. Detroit outshot Edmonton 238-155 over six games, but Dwayne Roloson posted a .929 save percentage for the Oilers while Manny Legace did not have a good series (.884) for the Wings.

Washington’s stunning seven-game loss to Montreal birthed the legend of Jaroslav Halak in La Belle Province. The Capitals dominated through four games to take a 3-1 lead, then Halak stopped 121 of 124 shots over the next three games.

Anaheim was the only team of the five that did not win the Presidents’ Trophy. The Ducks went 13-6-3 after the break and finished second overall, one point behind the Boston Bruins.

That Ducks team was the only one of this group that had to navigate the NHL’s new playoff format, which does not reward the best teams like the previous one. From 1999-2013, the Ducks would have faced the lowest-remaining seed, the Wild, and not their I-5 archrivals.

This is likely to come into play for the Avs. As of Saturday morning, the Wild and Stars are third and fifth in the NHL standings and easily second and third in the Western Conference, but the Avs’ path to a potential Cup has to run through one of them in the second round, not the conference final.

There are definitely going to be challenges for the Avalanche. Colorado has eight Olympians, including four who have been injured at some point during the lead-up to the break. The schedule is going to be daunting. The playoff format isn’t going to help.

The NHL has always had a compressed schedule in Olympic years when it sends its players to the tournament. There were no NHL players in 2018, in part because of a dispute with the IIHF and waning support for the idea from the league’s owners.

There were going to be NHL players in 2022, but the Covid-19 global epidemic wasn’t done wreaking havoc on the sport. The NHL called off its involvement and shifted nearly 100 games into what was going to be the Olympic break.

That was a good year for the Avalanche. Colorado handled the changing schedule and the lingering effects of the epidemic en route to the third Stanley Cup championship in franchise history.

This edition of the Avalanche, even after the historic start to the season, is certainly going to have to earn it if Colorado is going to be home to the Stanley Cup champions again.

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