“All the pieces, including depth pieces, serve a purpose.”
Adding new players is a delicate process.
The Colorado Avalanche knows a thing or two about that this year. While the calendars were still reading the year 2024, they had swapped out their entire goalie tandem. Alexandar Georgiev and Justus Annunen were out, and Mackenzie Blackwood and Scott Wedgewood came in.
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Further into the season, the Avalanche made many more additions. Brock Nelson, Charlie Coyle, Ryan Lindgren, and Jack Drury were a few of the other players acquired during the season.
With that many new faces on the team, concern arises about upsetting the team chemistry. To the players’ credit, that was not the case.
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“We came back with a lot of the same guys,” Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar said to the media in a scrum after his team’s Game 1 victory over the Dallas Stars. “We were banged up early in the season. We got a look at our guys going into the season, what we liked and didn’t like.”
“I feel like as a coach we were really lucky,” Bednar revealed. “We re-vamped the most major parts of our lineup.”
“The two goalies right away, strength down the middle of the ice when you get Drury, Coyle, and Nelson, added some grit and determination on the backend in Lindgren.”
🗣️Jared Bednar
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"I can't say enough about the moves that he [Chris MacFarland] made to re-vamp our team."#GoAvsGo | @gs_off_icepic.twitter.com/86IP0NhZxQ
Blackwood performed admirably in the first playoff game of his career. The 28-year-old stopped 23 of 24 shots to backstop the Avalanche to a 5-1 victory in Game 1.
Not bad for his first playoff game.
“It’s never easy winning (in the) regular season, playoffs it gets harder every single round,” Bednar said. “We feel like we have a good team and it’s up to us to go play our best hockey for two weeks at a time, as far as you can possibly go and try to reward the organization for giving us those players.”
“I can’t say enough about the moves that he made to revamp our team.”
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