Colorado Avalanche

From Quebec City to the Rockies

The club now playing out of Ball Arena started life in 1972 as the Quebec Nordiques, spending seven seasons in the World Hockey Association before entering the NHL in 1979. Sixteen NHL seasons in Quebec City produced strong teams and a hard rivalry with Montreal but no championship. In May 1995 the franchise was sold and moved to Denver, where it was renamed the Colorado Avalanche.

The move paid off at once. In their first season in Denver the Avalanche swept the Florida Panthers in the 1996 Stanley Cup Final, becoming the first NHL team to win the Cup immediately after a relocation. The white pom-poms that supporters still wave in the play-offs date from that first Denver year, meant to stand for snow coming down a mountain.

The team later moved into what is now Ball Arena, which opened on 1 October 1999 and holds 17,809 for hockey. It is owned by Kroenke Sports and Entertainment and has carried Ball Corporation's name since October 2020, when the naming rights passed over from PepsiCo.

Three finals, three cups

Colorado's championship record is unusual in its completeness: three trips to the Stanley Cup Final and three wins. The 1996 sweep was followed by a seven-game win over the New Jersey Devils in 2001, then a 21-year gap before the 2022 side beat the Tampa Bay Lightning in six games. The Avalanche remain the only active NHL club to have won every final it has reached.

The 2022 team's core still runs the current one. Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar wear the alternate captain's A behind Gabriel Landeskog, Devon Toews and Artturi Lehkonen are still in the lineup, and Jared Bednar, who coached that Cup side, is still behind the bench. Around them the roster has been reshaped largely by trade and signing rather than by draft: Martin Nečas and Brent Burns arrived in 2025, with Brock Nelson and Jaden Schwartz added since.

A 121-point season, then four games

2025–26 was the best regular season in the club's history. Colorado finished 55–16–11 for 121 points, taking the Central Division and the Presidents' Trophy, scoring 302 goals and conceding 203. The oddities piled up along the way: back-to-back shutouts on consecutive days on 22 and 23 November 2025, a first for the franchise; a single regulation loss in the first 26 games, matching the 1979–80 Philadelphia Flyers; and only two regulation defeats in 40 games, which no team had managed before. They were the first club in the league to clinch a play-off place, on 20 March 2026, extending their run of post-season appearances to nine seasons and tying Tampa Bay for the longest active streak.

MacKinnon carried the scoring with 127 points from 53 goals and 74 assists, which brought him the first Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy of his career and a place among the Hart Trophy finalists, where Nikita Kucherov beat him. Makar finished second to Zach Werenski in Norris voting. The goaltending workload was split, Scott Wedgewood taking 31 wins while Trent Miner posted the better average at 2.03.

None of it survived the spring. The Avalanche swept Los Angeles in the first round and beat Minnesota 4–1 in the second, then lost four straight to the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Final. A team that had lost twice in regulation across its first 40 games went out of the deepest round it reached without winning a game in it.

Sakic back in the chair

The summer brought an unplanned change at the top. On 2 June 2026 general manager Chris MacFarland left to become president of hockey operations and general manager of the Nashville Predators. Joe Sakic, who had moved up to president of hockey operations in July 2022 when MacFarland was promoted, stepped back into the general manager's job on an interim basis, covering the draft and the opening of free agency. By 14 September it was reported that there would be no search for a replacement and that the role was his full time.

The other off-season story was Landeskog, and it was closer to the bone. The captain missed three full regular seasons after playing through a knee injury in the 2022 play-offs, had four operations, and became the first NHL player to come back from knee cartilage replacement surgery when he returned for Colorado's 2025 play-off opener. In 2025–26 he played 60 games for 35 points and added 11 points in 13 play-off games; Colorado went 45–7–8 with him in the lineup and 10–9–3 across the 22 games he missed. He also captained Sweden at the Winter Olympics in February 2026, scoring four points in five games. On 9 June his family surprised him with the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy, and he collected the Mark Messier Leadership Award the same day.

November 2026: first in scoring, middling in defence

Through 15 games of 2026–27 the Avalanche are 9–5–1 for 19 points, second in the Central behind Minnesota's 23 and seventh in the overall standings. The balance of the team has shifted from last season: they lead the league at 4.21 goals a game and rank 14th at 3.07 against. Home form is 6–1–1, the road record 3–4–0. The season opened on 30 September with an 8–4 win over Los Angeles, and MacKinnon was again in front with 22 points through 28 October, with Lehkonen on ten goals.

The most recent win came at the United Center on 2 November, where Colorado went 2–0 down inside the first period and then scored five in a row to beat Chicago 5–2. Nazem Kadri and Jaden Schwartz scored twice each, T.J. Hughes had two assists, Mackenzie Blackwood made 21 saves and Toews finished it with an empty-netter. Bednar's reading afterwards was that "we kind of buckled down a little bit and felt the urgency of our game rise right away". It was a third straight win and a fourth in five.

The same evening the club put out its Hometown Remix alternate shirt, pale blue with a C on the chest, which it will wear six times this season and wore for the first time in Chicago. The date circled on the calendar is 31 December, when the Avalanche meet the Utah Mammoth at Rice–Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City in the 2027 Winter Classic. That fixture was announced on 8 January 2026; it is the franchise's first appearance in the series and the first NHL game played outdoors in Utah.

A night at Ball Arena

The building is about to change. A $135 million renovation announced in September 2026 will widen the entrances, put a glass facade on an expanded east atrium and add escalators, a new team shop and three clubs, with the work due for completion by the 2028–29 season. For now the arena sits at 1000 Chopper Circle off Speer Boulevard, and the car parks around it are earmarked for a far larger housing redevelopment approved in October 2024.

What happens inside is consistent from night to night, and the part visitors tend to remember is not on the ice. Midway through the third period, usually during a stoppage and usually with Colorado ahead, arena DJ Craig Turney plays Blink-182's "All the Small Things" and the crowd sings it, then keeps singing once play restarts. Turney started it in the 2019–20 season after hearing the song on the radio, and has described the reaction as unplanned: "They just loved it. It was organic. It wasn't staged." When the 2020 play-offs moved to a bubble in Edmonton with no crowd, he talked the house DJ there through playing it anyway. Mark Hoppus has called the ritual amazing.

Reviews from the stands are warm about the noise and cooler about the fittings, with recurring complaints about narrow seats and about the food and drink. For the 2026 play-offs the club opened a fan zone outside the arena, Avs Alley, for supporters without tickets. Bernie, the mascot, works the concourses rather than only the ice.