Leftover thoughts from an Avalanche season gone too soon…

Like most of you who frequent this site, I’m still trying to process just what in the heck happened in the past few days with the Colorado Avalanche.

Some stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

• My hunch is that Jared Bednar will be back, but in no way am I overconfident on that. But I don’t see Joe Sakic just arbitrarily sacking him. I do think that he’ll take some time to think some things over, but Bednar led a team to a President’s Trophy that had 311 man-games lost to injury. It was still a very good season.
• The expansion draft for the Kraken is July 21. Teams have to have their protected/exposed lists in by July 17.
• The biggest decision Sakic and Co. have to make is “do we protect four defensemen or just three?”
• Conventional wisdom has always held it’s smarter to just protect seven forwards, 3 D and one goalie. But if you have four real good D men, as the Avs do, you can protect four of them and four forwards, along with a goalie.
• I think the Avs will do a 7-3-1 list, but that probably means losing Ryan Graves to the Kraken. Yeah, there are youngsters coming who can fill his spot, including Bo Byram, Justin Barron and Drew Helleson.
• I think Erik Johnson had a chance to come back in the next series, which makes the loss even tougher to swallow. It would have been nice to see EJ out there.
• Everyone assumes EJ will waive his no-move clause, thereby allowing the Avs to expose him to Seattle. But until that happens…
• Remember, EJ has earned the right to say no to the Avs on this topic.
• But I don’t think he’d want to put the Avs in a bind like that. And besides, I would think the odds the Kraken would take EJ would be fairly low.
• With Nazem Kadri still having one year left on his deal, I think the Avs will protect him, keep him and, depending how his and the team’s season goes, think about maybe moving him at the trade deadline. If he’s playing great? Great, he stays.
• Again, I’m sorry for letting an F word slip in my question to MacKinnon the other night. I was trying to ask something along the lines of “Hey Nate, if this team is guilty of thinking too much out there, do you ever think the mindset should just be screw it, we’re not gonna get up in our heads so much?” Instead, I mangled the question entirely, used a worse word and got rightly mocked for it. I guess, in my stupid head, I was thinking it was just a couple people in the conversation, and not subject to being streamed everywhere. My apologies, won’t happen again.