The Colorado Avalanche are out. They will not be advancing to the Western Conference Finals as the Dallas Stars eliminated them in six games.
There will be no Stanley Cup returning to Colorado this season. Now, every team remaining has either never won the Cup or their last championship came in a year that started with one.
The Avalanche have been an elite team for a few years now but this year's journey will end in the second round.
These are the three biggest reasons that they won't be lifting Lord Stanley's Cup later this June:
The Colorado goaltending didn't match the Dallas goaltending
Alexandar Georgiev is a great goaltender but he wasn't good enough in this series vs the Dallas Stars. He went 2-4 with a .895 save percentage.
On the other side, Jake Oettinger was great for the Stars against the Colorado Avalanche. He went 4-2 with a .911 save percentage.
Georgiev made some big-time saves but not enough to earn the Avalanche the win in the series. A lot of that has to do with Dallas's great play but Colorado made things hard on Oettinger too. He won the battle this time around.
This isn't to say that Colorado needs to go out and make a change this summer but it wouldn't be surprising if they did either. It is never a bad idea to at least consider an upgrade at any position, especially goaltender.
There are times when you wonder how far they can go if they were to keep Georgiev as their number one guy. They haven't made it out of the second round since he took over.
The bottom line here is that the Dallas Stars won the goaltending battle this time around. We'll see how the Avalanche respond to it in the off-season and next year.