Colorado has been building toward a three-year window of Cup contention, and Sakic said he believes that window is still open.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a great hockey team here, and this team was built for a two-, three-year run,” Sakic said. “We still got most of the guys coming back, and their expectations, our expectations, I know the fans’ expectations, is to try and win a Cup.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We could panic and try and blow everything up and start all over, but this team, what they’ve done over the course of the year was pretty remarkable. Now we want to give them an opportunity to try and do it again. I mean, the last two trade deadlines were meant for not just that year. It was to try and compete for a few years with this group and try and bring home the Stanley Cup, and that’s the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keeping that group together includes retaining coach Jared\u00a0Bednar and his staff. The 54-year-old, who has one year remaining on his contract, is 445-262-75 in 10 seasons with the Avalanche and 60-41 in 101 playoff games, including the Cup championship in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHe’s got the confidence from the players,\u201d Sakic said. \u201cIt\u2019s clear from everybody, from players, the staff, that he’s the right guy. They respect him, they love playing for him, and that’s a big thing. And when we look at it for this group, he’s the best coach. He\u2019s the best coach for the group, and we’re confident in that decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He’s not just the coach, I mean, he’s the voice of the of the organization, and, like I said, the players really believe in him, and I’m going with the players.\u201d<\/p>\n
Added Kroenke Sports and Entertainment vice chairman Josh Kroenke: \u201cI think he has [the] absolute belief of the dressing room.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alterations to the makeup of the team could still happen. Sakic hasn\u2019t ruled out anything in pursuit of winning with this current core, including signing pending free agent\u00a0defensemen Brent Burns<\/a> and Brett Kulak<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s always changes, but we have the core guys here,\u201d Sakic said. “We have a nucleus. We’re a deep team. We feel we’re strong in all the positions. Obviously, we have some UFAs that we’re going to try and sign to keep the group together. … Right now, the priority is getting through the draft, free agency. Try and make our team as good as possible going into the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Colorado has been building toward a three-year window of Cup contention, and Sakic said he believes that window…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":730591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-730590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/730591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}