The trade deadline is just a month away, and teams are circling like vultures over the bottom feeders in the NHL. They smell blood in the waters of Colorado, with media and fan pressure to shake up the team and start again. This core, though still quite young, is apparently about to be broken up. Matt Duchene and Gabriel Landeskog are the most common names mentioned, and Adrian Dater of the Bleacher Report revealed what one source tells him it would cost to land one of them.
“At bare minimum it’ll take young, established D player and 1st round pick to get either Duchene or Landy”, Dater tweeted Saturday afternoon following it up by saying though Sakic could possibly get more, he’d likely do it for that package. This comes on the heels of an earlier report from Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun that said it would cost a young defenseman, first-round pick and a top prospect.
For the Avalanche, who sit in last place in the entire NHL and are on pace for an astonishingly-low season total of 50 points (the Toronto Maple Leafs finished 30th last season with 69 points) it’s clearly a frustrating time. The team has three forwards who are legitimate stars in Duchene, Landeskog and Nathan MacKinnon and an emerging talent in Mikko Rantanen, but haven’t been able to put together anything this season. For Landeskog especially this has been a tough year, scoring just 17 points through the first half of the season.
Any team looking to add one of the Colorado forwards has to be wary of their contracts, as both carry hefty cap-hits for the next few years (Landeskog has four years left while Duchene only has two). Both players do come with quite a history of success however, and are young enough to fit into pretty much any stage in a team’s development.