Colorado won the Presidents\u2019 Trophy as the best team in the regular season (55-16-11) and was considered a championship contender, if not the favorite, heading into the playoffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet, after sweeping the Los Angeles Kings in the first round and defeating the Minnesota Wild in five games in the second, things fell apart in the conference final, and Colorado lost in four games to the Golden Knights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe came off a big win against Minnesota and five days later we\u2019re looking in the mirror and we\u2019re about to get swept. It happened fast,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cYou have a whole long summer to think about it, and you try to learn from it. We have a bit of a runway here, we have the same core coming back and we\u2019ve made improvements going into this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
With MacKinnon, Landeskog, and defensemen\u00a0Cale Makar<\/a> and Devon Toews<\/a> leading the way, Colorado is again expected to be a Stanley Cup contender. The Avalanche roster also includes forwards Martin Necas<\/a>, Brock Nelson<\/a>, Nazem Kadri<\/a> and Artturi Lehkonen<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kelly is hoping to play his part going into the first season of a four-year contract he signed on July 1, 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve had a good summer and I\u2019m ready to try and contribute on both sides of the game again this year,\u201d he said. \u201cWinning is hard and it starts when we begin arriving and at training camp on Sept. 16, when it opens. We\u2019re just going to try and build every day, every day just stack one brick on top of another one, and hopefully by the end, you\u2019re gunning for a long playoff run and everyone can stay healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Colorado won the Presidents\u2019 Trophy as the best team in the regular season (55-16-11) and was considered a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":871562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-871561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/871562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}