Where do the 2025 Colorado Avalanche go from here?

When you're a team like the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Florida Panthers, every summer is interesting.

But, like, "interesting" in that old-Chinese-curse way. "May you live in interesting times."

When you are trying to win a Stanley Cup every single year because you have a handful of the 10 or so best players in the world, you are necessarily going to be loading up at the trade deadline every year, and you are necessarily going to have very little cap space every summer. That's just how it goes.

So, this summer: Even with the salary cap going up, the Avalanche have just $8.7 million in cap space available to them, and a handful of vital roster spots to fill. In the past, that was the case for them, but they had the LTIR space created by seemingly career-ending injuries fo