By a guy who’s seen too much hockey, eaten too many arena nachos, and still believes in fair fights.
The Quiet Season: A Roster Rebuilt Over Cold Coffee and Cap Sheets
Some stories start in the offseason. This one started with heartbreak.
It’s early May, Game 7, third period. A 2-0 lead evaporates like morning fog under fluorescent lights in Dallas. Former Av Mikko Rantanen—still chewing gum, still breaking hearts—completes a hat trick that sends the Colorado Avalanche packing.
And just like that, the 2024–25 season is a memory no one wants to hang on a wall.
What came next wasn’t loud. It was methodical. Quiet. But it was movement. Because when you’re serious about winning, silence is just a sound that follows work.
Roster Moves Since May 1, 2025
The First Big Cut
June 27 — You move $7.75 million off the books by shipping Charlie Coyle and Miles Wood to Columbus. In return? A 5’9” firecracker named Gavin Brindley, a third-round pick (77th overall), and a conditional second in 2027. You don’t make that trade to feel good. You make it because you need breathing room, and the cap is a slow, grinding suffocation.
Fresh Ink on New Deals
Contracts are the currency of belief. Here’s who the Avalanche bet on this summer:
- May 30: Ilya Nabokov signs a two-year, entry-level deal. Goaltender. Unknown, maybe. But nobody’s unknown for long around here.
- June 4: Brock Nelson gets a three-year extension at $7.5M per. Steady, top-six scoring. You don’t overthink it. You just say yes.
- June 20: One-year, two-way deals for Matthew Stienburg and Jason Polin. Depth moves with a pulse.
- June 30: Sam Malinski signs a one-year extension ($1.4M); Trent Miner gets two years. Quiet pieces. But everything matters when the machine is humming.
- July 1: Parker Kelly inks four years, starting at $825K and climbing. Blue-collar guy. The kind of dude who parks in the back and leaves blood on the ice.
- Also on that day, signings for T.J. Tynan, Jack Ahcan, and Ronnie Attard—all on one-year, two-way deals. All at $775K. Simple. Necessary.
- July 2: Brent Burns. One year. One million. Yes, that Brent Burns. Age 40. Viking beard still intact. He’ll patrol the third pair and the penalty box, if needed.
- July 4: Alex Barre-Boulet signs for a year. Another $775K swing.
- July 10: Josh Manson re-signs. Two years, $4.5M in Year 1, $3.95M after. A staple returns. Scarred, maybe. Still standing.
The Ones That Got Away (Or Were Pushed)
Not every chapter has a warm goodbye.
- July 1: Drouin. Kiviranta. Erik Johnson. Lindgren. Vesey. Wagner. Gone. Some like Tynan and Ahcan re-signed. Some left quietly. Others weren’t even asked back.
- July 8: William Dufour signs with KHL’s Lada Togliatti. It ends not with a bang, but with a plane ticket to Russia.
A Team Taking Shape
This is what’s left. This is what’s being built.
Forwards
Top Six:
MacKinnon, Landeskog, Nelson, Nichushkin, Lehkonen, Necas. That’s nearly $44 million in firepower. If chemistry works and knees hold up, it’s one of the best top-sixes in hockey. If not? That’s a different story.
Bottom Six:
Colton (hurt), Drury, Parker Kelly. Logan O’Connor (also hurt). Gavin Brindley and Zakhar Bardakov will scrap for jobs. That fourth line could come from a blender.
Defense
Top Pair:
Makar and Toews. No notes. Pure poetry.
Second Pair:
Manson and Girard. One made of muscle and mileage. The other of silk and scars.
Third Pair:
Burns and Malinski. Wild card duo. Could be brilliant. Could be broken.
Goaltending
Blackwood and Wedgewood. $6.75 million worth of competence. No superstar. No crisis. Just good enough to not talk about it much—which is often the dream.
The Cap Situation: Tight, But Manageable
- Total Cap Hit: $91,376,667
- Cap Space Remaining: $4,123,333
- Performance Bonuses: Up to $4M (so maybe don’t spend that yet)
Not much wiggle room. But a little room is better than none when the season drags you through the wringer.
How the Roster Is Built
This team is built like a good diner menu: a few classics, some oddball ingredients, and no time for filler.
You clear the decks by trading Coyle and Wood. You grab Burns because experience doesn’t grow on trees. You double down on Nelson, bank on Landy’s return, and pray the knees hold up until April.
Fans are split. Reddit’s a battlefield. Some love Blackwood. Others miss Mittelstadt. Most are still processing that Game 7 exit like it was a bad breakup. The kind where you replay every moment in slow motion.
What’s Next: Moves on the Horizon
There’s still $4.1 million left. Here’s what the Avalanche could do:
- Martin Necas: Trade bait or cornerstone? Depends on belief—and offers.
- Bottom-Six Help: Names like Conner Brown, J.G. Pageau (at half cap), or even a Kiviranta reunion get tossed around.
- Defensive Depth: Some want to move Colton or Girard for cap relief and grab a bigger right-handed D-man. Think Perbix. Think bite.
- Prospects: If Brindley or Bardakov lights it up in camp, you don’t need to go shopping. You just open the door.
The Verdict: Calculated, Not Complacent
This isn’t panic. This isn’t blowing it up.
This is the quiet season—where good GMs do their best work over coffee cups and blurry spreadsheets, with one eye on the future and the other on the damage that losing leaves behind.
The Avalanche are built to go deep. But depth, health, and a bit of luck will decide if they do.
And if they don’t?
The next quiet season starts all over again.
Some rules come from the top down. Bureaucrats in suits, convinced they’ve outsmarted the game. Others come from lived experience—the kind you earn when you’ve seen one too many playoff teams buy their way past the cap with a third team wearing the face of Arizona.
This new one? It’s a little of both.
Starting in 2026–27, NHL teams who retain salary in a trade can no longer pass it along like a half-smoked cigarette outside a dive bar five minutes before the trade deadline. There’s a 75-day waiting period before a contract with retained salary can be flipped again.
On the surface, it’s boring. But scratch the surface, and what you find is something real: the League finally tightening the noose around one of its dirtiest little open secrets—cap laundering.
The Old Hustle
You know the type. The contender with no cap space and a desperate need for grit, experience, or one last center with faceoff wins in his blood. Enter: Team C. A third party with no dog in the fight but plenty of cap room and a sweet tooth for 5th-round picks.
For years, teams like San Jose, Arizona, Detroit—franchises stuck in the rebuild purgatory—offered up their cap space for rent. Like hotel rooms, just less clean and far more expensive.
Tampa Bay got David Savard this way. Toronto landed Nick Foligno. Vegas, always up against it, once used three teams to sneak a player into their roster like a stowaway.
It was legal. It was clever. And it was a little greasy.
The New Reality
With the 75-day rule, that easy backdoor is now bolted shut. You want to retain salary? Fine. But commit. You don’t get to flip it again tomorrow like you’re running a used car lot.
And make no mistake—this isn’t just bookkeeping. It’s a shift in the power dynamics of the league.
Deadline day will be different. The smell of desperation won’t be quite so thick. The last-minute miracle trades, the cap acrobatics? Fewer of them. Maybe that’s good. Maybe it just means GMs will need to start making their moves in December instead of waiting for the final buzzer.
Why It Matters
This rule wasn’t about punishing the savvy. It was about protecting the soul of the game. About making sure the teams that win in April aren’t the ones who cut the best cap deal in February.
It’s about making things harder for the paper champions. The ones who’ve mastered loopholes but forgotten how to play the long game.
Hockey, at its core, is a game of attrition. Of pain, luck, and second efforts. Of traveling through Winnipeg in January and still showing up ready to bleed for the guy next to you.
This rule, minor as it seems, nudges the sport a little closer back to that spirit.
But Let’s Be Honest
Some team will find a new trick. They always do. The NHL is a cathedral of tradition built on a foundation of clever workarounds and dark magic. From LTIR resurrection acts to tax haven teams, the grift will evolve.
But for now, let’s acknowledge the rarest of things: a rule change that didn’t come from a think tank, but from watching the game lose just enough of its soul to make you pause.
Final Bite
Hockey is supposed to be beautiful in its brutality. Honest in its outcomes. And if we’re lucky, just chaotic enough to remind us why we fell in love in the first place.
This new rule won’t fix everything. But it cuts the right way.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
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