Fire everybody. Into the sun, if possible.
The 2026 Western Conference Final was played anywhere Vegas wanted it. The corners. The boards. The neutral zone. In between the Avalanche players’ ears, mostly.
The Golden Knights turned the NHL’s fastest team into a Corvette on cinder blocks. This wasn’t just a sweep. It was Hartbreak. It was arguably the biggest Colorado sports choke since Broncos-Jaguars in ’96. It was six days in May we’ll never get back. It was so bad, David Adelman cringed.
“Disappointed. Humiliated,” Avs forward Logan O’Connor, as stand-up as they come, told reporters at T-Mobile Arena after his season ended in a 2-1 defeat. “I think, to a man, (we) just weren’t good enough. Not a single guy was the whole entire series.”
The Golden Knights burned with hunger, fear and desperation, especially at Ball Arena, where the tone for disaster was set. Vegas players pounded the glass and drove the puck as if they’d just watched their coach get fired on March 29 — and any one of them could be next.
The Avs played hurt, yes. They also played fat and happy in Games 1 and 2. They carried the look of a roster with guaranteed contracts and guaranteed tee times, the harbinger of a fore-game sweep.
That starts at the top.
Stan Kroenke and Josh Kroenke are hoops, football and soccer guys first. They treat the Avs like a burgundy-headed stepchild. They love that their little hockey team, at least compared to the Nuggets, is a no-drama llama. They’re happy to let Joe Sakic sweat the small stuff.
Vegas fans brought the brooms Tuesday night. It’s time Super Joe started swinging his around.
The Avalanche are too stubborn. Too comfortable. If general manager Chris MacFarland wants to leave the Front Range to go rebuild the Nashville Predators, let him. C-Mac’s re-arranged deck chairs about 17 times since the Avs won it all five years ago. All it’s done is make the best fans in hockey angrier and the best roster in the game older. Way, way, waaaay older.
Once Cale Makar was out and Nathan MacKinnon got dinged in the knee, Colorado began to show its age. Brent Burns turns 42 in March. Nazem Kadri will be 36 in October; Brock Nelson and Josh Manson turn 35 that month. Scott Wedgewood turns 34 in August. Captain Gabe Landeskog turns 34 in November. Devon Toews turns 33 next February; Valeri Nichushkin will be 32 in March.
Cale Makar (8) of the Colorado Avalanche prepares to play down one goal late in the game against the Vegas Golden Knights during the third period of the Golden Knights’ 2-1 win in Game 4 of the NHL Western Conference Final at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, May 26, 2026. Vegas finished the series with a 4-0 sweep and will advance to the Stanley Cup Final. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
The Avs wouldn’t be running it back in 2027. They’d be hobbling. And hobbling with about $3 million in projected cap space to play with, according to Spotrac.com, the smallest cushion in the NHL.
“How big their window? I don’t want to say it’s closing. But it’s not opening,” former Avs great Erik Johnson, now an ESPN analyst, told the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast a few days back.
“They’ve already played (the) shake-up-your-core card with (Mikko) Rantanen, right? So they’ve played that card. What’s the next card they play, if they still feel like their window’s open — which I think it is?”
Play the Joker, Super Joe. Go wild.
The Avs need fresh eyes. Fresh legs. Fresh voices. Fresh ideas. Almost every “tough guy” MacFarland acquired lost their edge once they moved to the mountains. Almost every 2C revamp since a younger Kadri left five years ago eventually crashed or burned. Jared Bednar has become the George Karl of Avs coaches — a regular-season savant and a playoff fraud.
Bednar’s white board during the playoffs never seems to have an answer for a team that takes away the rush, clogs the neutral zone and clamps down on the tempo. Once Bedsy finds a Plan B in May, he rarely sticks to it. Colorado appeared out of gas by midway through Game 3 of the Western Conference Final. Zone entries stunk. Zone exits stunk. A team with the best record in the NHL looked like strangers playing pick-up on the pond.
Injuries? Cry us a river. Dallas beat the Avs in the first round of the ’25 playoffs without Jason Robertson and Miro Heiskanen. The Knights didn’t have captain Mark Stone for Games 1 and 2 in Denver. Injuries in the Stanley Cup are excuses — everybody’s got them. You find a path. You find a way.
The Avs rolled over. Over the last 13 minutes of the second period and the first eight minutes of the third stanza, Colorado, while trailing 1-0 in a do-or-die contest, got one shot off. One. When Vegas’ Tomas Hertl appeared to interfere with Martin Necas with 8:04 left in the second frame, the latter went down in a heap while the former just laughed. No call. MacKinnon got tripped. No call. Vegas had too many men. No call.
The bracket says a VGK sweep had to be a fluke. It wasn’t. Vegas goalie Carter Hart, icky narrative and all, was the best player in the series. The Avs ran into a bigger, smarter, sharper version of the Kings. Yet while Los Angeles knew it was out of its weight class from the jump, John Tortorella’s guys smelled a sucker with a soft underbelly. Play with your food against Vegas, they’ll take your lunch money and ransack the kitchen.
At least it was over with early, unlike Game 3’s cruel cosmic joke. Kadri didn’t track Stone some 4:42 into Game 4, and the sight of the 57-year-old winger somehow beating Kadri and Makar down the ice, then backhanding Vegas into a 1-0 lead, summed up a series in all its agony.
The hockey gods twisted a rusty knife with 6:08 left in the opening stanza. Nelson beat the Vegas defense for a point-blank look in front of the Golden Knights’ crease, not all that different from the chance Stone got. Only No. 11 fired high and saw his puck snatched out of the air by Hart, the way your uncle used to catch a mosquito and squash it in his palm.
“I think Jared Bednar is a heck of a coach,” Johnson opined. “But at the same time, if you go through the window of Landeskog, MacKinnon and Makar, and you only get one Cup in that whole Avalanche era of their greatness, I think that’s a failure, right?”
Darn straight. If you can’t find Plan B on the ice, it’s time to find it somewhere else. Until the Avs feel uncomfortable, no one should ever feel truly comfortable about them lifting Lord Stanley again.
