The Colorado Avalanche are the best NHL team you’re not watching

The West Coast is not doing the Colorado Avalanche any favors as the NHL‘s hottest, most exciting team to start the 2019-20 season.

There is a ring of truth to the statement that hockey overall has an “East Coast bias” when it comes to NHL storylines. The East Coast is usually how the news cycle dictates its day, as the Eastern time zone houses the majority of America’s population, and thus dominates how the news is distributed.

As such, many hockey fans and media often miss watching hockey games from certain teams throughout the season — unless you’re a night owl — all because start times during the work week hit upwards of 10:30 p.m. on the East Coast. This exact phenomenon of too late start times is what is holding back the Colorado Avalanche, it seems, from being the darlings of the NHL.

Early in the 2019-20 NHL season, the Avalanche have yet to lose a game in regulation through eight games, posting a 7-0-1 record on the year. Colorado’s lone loss came in overtime against the Pittsburgh Penguins last week, but they’ve been perfect on the year otherwise.

The team is second in the NHL in goals-for (35) and first overall in average goals for per game (4.38), boasting a talented offensive core with the line of Mikko Rantanen, Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog leading the charge. Unlike teams like the Minnesota Wild, the Avalanche have all of their best players on the right side of 30, with only five members of their 23-man roster being above the age of 30.

The Avalanche are talented, incredibly so, and while the Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen line drives the team offensively, the team is getting production from their auxiliary members such as Andre Burakovsky and Nazem Kadri when needed. Colorado is also lighting up the scoresheet while not having a deadly power play, which is what powers many top NHL teams. In eight games so far this season, the Avalanche have been hitting on 20 percent of their power plays in 30 opportunities, right in the middle of the NHL.

Goaltending is also bolstering the Avalanche this season, as netminder Philipp Grubauer has a .919 save percentage in six games played, while backup Pavel Francouz has a .951 save percentage in two games played.

And yet, despite being the NHL‘s best team and Rantanen putting together one of the best goal sequences we’ve seen this year, the Avalanche hardly seem to be talked about in the early-goings of the season.

The Avalanche were, to be fair to the skeptics, the worst team in hockey during the 2016-17 season. The team had no sense of direction as head coach Patrick Roy quit two months before the start of the season and star forward Matt Duchene requested a trade out of the city. The team has since built themselves back up as potential Stanley Cup contenders by embracing analytics and drafting talented players to fit their needs, and last year the team made it to the second round of the postseason because of it.

This week, the Avalanche will face their toughest tests of the season with games against the St. Louis Blues, the Vegas Golden Knights, and the Anaheim Ducks. Two of those teams made the playoffs last season, with the Blues coming off their first Stanley Cup championship, while the Ducks boast the stalwart John Gibson in net.

Should the Avalanche prevail and come out of this week with a winning record, Colorado has the potential to separate themselves from a packed top half of the NHL standings. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the Avalanche take their first, and maybe more, regulation losses of the season this week, but the team should remain on many fan’s radars as ones to look out for as this NHL season rolls along.