Colorado Avalanche 1st-round exit: Bust or honorable title defense?

Cale Makar sat silent in full uniform.

The young face of the Colorado Avalanche revealed no expression on his face, only a blank stare toward the middle of the losing locker room where teammates’ jerseys had already been discarded into the laundry heap. His jersey remained attached to him for 15 extra minutes. He didn’t want to part with it yet. He didn’t understand how to part with it this early.

“It’s tough to grasp right now,” Makar eventually said long after Colorado’s 2-1 Game 7 loss to Seattle late Sunday.

The 24-year-old, who had just played his 62nd career playoff game, never experienced a first-round exit in his first four postseasons. In the Makar Era, the Avs win a series. At least one. That much is an expectation, a source of comfort.

Except they didn’t this time. Seattle stole not just Game 7 but a seven-game series from the champs and was celebrating a franchise first down the hall. So, as Colorado’s shocked locker room emptied, Makar didn’t budge from the seat of his stall — helmet neatly placed to his right, gloves still on, skates still tied. Makar always likes to get out his skates before standing for a postgame interview.

“I don’t think many guys in this room take losing very well,” Bo Byram told The Post across the room.

Then, a dejected Makar finally put words to it: “I feel like I let the guys down. I feel like I didn’t have a great series. So yeah. That’s just a tough one.”

That’s not how this happened. The biggest offense Makar committed was the suspension-worthy hit on Jared McCann that forced Makar to miss Game 5. All that did was illustrate how much Colorado desperately needed him on the ice in this series.

That was the story of the 2022-23 Avalanche season and the story of its unceremonious end. Turns out, the over-reliance on star power that caused apprehension in January wasn’t sustainable in the heat of the playoffs.

Fifteen different Kraken players scored a goal in the first-round series, but nobody potted more than a pair. Mikko Rantanen and Nathan MacKinnon combined for 10 of Colorado’s 19 goals. The Avs outscored the Kraken 13-4 when MacKinnon was on the ice. Their Game 7 starters combined for 37 of their 52 individual points (71.2%) in the series. An Avalanche bottom-six forward never scored in seven games.

Once Valeri Nichushkin and Andrew Cogliano were gone, the Avs ran out of organizational depth to back up their core players. They finished the season with more than 450-man games lost.

“Weirdest season of my career for sure,” Rantanen said, and that’s a career that includes a pandemic bubble in Edmonton and a year of empty arenas.

Gabriel Landeskog was the obvious emblem of the season, casting a shadow from October to April (and now beyond) due to his injured right patellar cartilage. Colorado’s captain still traveled during the series and even offered calming moral support during intermissions. His on-ice impact was missed the most in the end.

MacKinnon missed weeks. Byram and Josh Manson missed months. Nichushkin was in and out of the lineup. Makar was sidelined five different times since January with various injuries.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be a season again — knock on wood — where we go through that many injuries,” Makar said. “Everybody was grinding out, playing big minutes in certain months that you shouldn’t be playing big minutes in.”

Perhaps that’s why most of Colorado’s players struck a tone somewhere between despondency and pride after Game 7.

“We put up a hell of a fight,” Byram told The Post. “We went through a lot this season. Hard to look at any positives right now, but I’m sure in a few days’ time or however long it takes, we’ll look back at some of the positives and some of the fun things.”

Does coach Jared Bednar see it the same way? Give it a couple of weeks?

“I’m already there,” he said, claiming he got over the frustration about the injuries months ago. “… I don’t have a bad word to say about those guys in there. They were great all year.”

“We’re missing five or six guys from last year’s team,” MacKinnon contextualized.

Therein lies the other theme of the year. No Nazem Kadri. No Andre Burakovsky, who rooted for Seattle from the press box this series. No Darcy Kuemper, although Alexandar Georgiev turned out to be a mighty fine replacement in goal. The salary cap is cruel to every team that wins a Stanley Cup.

“There’s a cost to winning,” Bednar said. “You lose a bunch of guys, which was our second line last year, and then kind of lose our second line again.”

And never quite bolstered it. The 2023 trade deadline might always remain a well of what-ifs, especially in relation to last year’s. Colorado spent big for Artturi Lehkonen, Manson and Cogliano then won a Cup in ’22. Chris MacFarland and Joe Sakic pumped the breaks this time, trading for a third-line center rather than a second, perhaps sensing the strife wasn’t about to stop.

The ensuing questions will be the legacy of a shattered season. Would the Avalanche have gone further with more aggression? Or was the cautious deadline approach an example of foresight and restraint that most fans lack? Was Colorado’s championship defense a failure by virtue of stalling in the first round? Or an honorable effort by virtue of winning the division after considerable adversity and “a (bleep) streak through the middle of the year,” as Evan Rodrigues called it?

Directly to the right of a somber Makar, a red-eyed Erik Johnson attested that the Avalanche’s championship window remains “wide, wide open.”

“Cale, Nate, Mikko,” said Johnson, a 35-year-old pending free agent and symbol of the team’s unknown future. “As long as those three guys are here, the window is open and will continue to be open.”

Seven stunning games just revealed that the window is also dependent on who surrounds them.

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