Kadri Out Weeks: Examining Avalanche Trade Options

Well, the news certainly wasn’t good this morning. On his weekly radio show, Jared Bednar broke the news: Nazem Kadri will be out for several weeks with a lower-body injury. And the Avs trade deadline plans might need to change.

He got the injury on that faceoff in Minnesota. He tried to come back into the game, played one shift, obviously felt some pain and skated right back down the tunnel, finished for the night.

To me, it looked like the same kind of injury Mikko Rantanen suffered in St. Louis. His leg twisted and his body weight kind of made things worse on the way down.

So…what do the Avs do now? Recently, here on the site and on the podcast, I said I thought it would be a fairly quiet Feb. 24 Avs trade deadline, unless an injury to a top-six forward/D-man happened. Well, we have an injury to a top-six forward now, unfortunately.

While it seems fairly certain that Kadri will return before the end of the regular season, several weeks is a long time to go for a team trying to win a Central Division title, a team trying to at least win the second spot in the Central and guarantee home-ice for the first round, at least.

Let’s take a look at some of the options with this scenario: