Joe Sakic didn’t say much at the end of Colorado’s season—and in hindsight, that silence might have said plenty.
You can certainly credit Sakic for the way he handled the Avalanche’s end-of-season media availability earlier this month, especially in light of recent developments across the Stanley Cup Final picture.
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Typically, at the end of a season—particularly for teams that fall short in the playoffs—you get the full medical rundown: the bumps, bruises, injuries that shaped the outcome but only come to light afterward. Sakic didn’t go there. No list. No explanations. No built-in caveats.
In hindsight, it was a deliberate and effective choice to keep the discussion of injuries as minimal as possible. No excuses. The message was straightforward: everyone is expected to be healthy heading into training camp, and that was the extent of it. Whether a team chooses to disclose injuries publicly is ultimately its prerogative. In Colorado’s case, the organization opted for discretion, even if it meant fewer storylines for the media and more room for speculation.
That context becomes more interesting given what the Vegas Golden Knights have since revealed about their own playoff health situation. By all accounts, they were dealing with significant injuries of their own.
Captain Mark Stone played through a torn adductor. William Karlsson underwent surgery for a broken wrist that ultimately sidelined him for the final game of the Stanley Cup Final, a 3-0 loss that clinched the championship for the Carolina Hurricanes. Defenseman Noah Hanifin was managing an upper-body injury that, under normal regular-season circumstances, likely would have kept him out for roughly two months. Brayden McNabb, according to both teammates and management, battled through multiple injuries during the playoff run, including the facial injury he sustained in Game 2 of the Final that quickly made the rounds on social media.
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Yet much of the conversation following Vegas’ sweep of Colorado in the Western Conference Final centered on the Avalanche’s injuries. And to be clear, they were real and they mattered. Several key players were clearly playing through issues, including Cale Makar, Artturi Lehkonen, Brent Burns, Sam Malinski, and Nathan MacKinnon, who took a puck to the knee in Game 3 and was noticeably limited afterward. However, he was held scoreless in the series, marking the first time in his playoff career that had happened in a postseason matchup.
But that’s the point.
Vegas was dealing with injuries, too—those are simply the ones they chose to acknowledge publicly. And even then, the focus remained on core pieces, not the full scope of what depth players may have been battling through behind the scenes.
Injuries, however, weren’t the reason Colorado lost control of the series.
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The Avalanche surrendered leads in two of the four games, including a 3-0 advantage in Game 3 that ultimately swung the series. At that level, against a team as structured as Vegas, those moments matter more than any post-series injury ledger.
As Jared Bednar noted several times throughout the postseason, that’s exactly what makes the Stanley Cup so unforgiving. It’s not just talent. It’s not just cap construction. It’s not even just surviving four rounds. Everything has to align at the right time.
“It’s partly why I think it is the hardest trophy to win just because of the grind of it all,” Bednar said. “Not only do you have to be good; you have to be healthy, you have to be lucky, you have to be tough, playing through injuries.
“You have to be mentally tough, too, because it is a grind every day; every game is a Game 7. Every game feels like it is Game 7 because you need to win it.”
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That reality makes Colorado’s playoff exit even harder to reconcile when set against what was, by almost every measure, the strongest regular season in franchise history.
The 2025-26 Avalanche finished with a franchise-record 121 points, surpassing the mark set by the 2000-01 Stanley Cup-winning team. They also captured the Presidents’ Trophy as the NHL’s top regular-season club and were dominant at both ends of the ice from start to finish.
Colorado led the league with 298 goals scored while allowing a league-low 197 goals against. Their plus-101 goal differential paced the NHL, and they finished first in both goals per game and goals against per game. On paper and over 82 games, no team was more complete.
That’s what makes the ending so difficult to process.
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The Avalanche didn’t lose because they lacked talent. They didn’t lose because they weren’t an elite team. They lost a series where execution, structure, and in-game details ultimately decided outcomes—and Vegas, when it mattered most, was simply sharper in those moments.
In a playoff environment where margins are razor-thin, that’s often all the difference there is.
And if you’re the Vegas Golden Knights, it came down to something much simpler: cleaner execution, tighter structure, and the ability to consistently take away the Avalanche’s biggest strengths when it mattered most.
But as the saying goes, there’s always next season.
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