The Colorado Avalanche are once again one of the NHL’s top teams. And in this feature article from The Hockey News’ Future Watch 2020 edition (Volume 73, Issue 5), we focused on the Avs’ top-ranked farm system – and specifically, on young defenseman and now-former Avalanche member Bo Byram.
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The Hockey News senior writer Ken Campbell wrote the story on the Avs, who wound up second in the Central Division in the 2019-20 season. The Avalanche’s prospects were ranked first in the league, and at the time, Byram – who was dealt to Buffalo at the NHL trade deadline this season – was an important component of their blueprint for long-term success. Byram was ranked the No. 1 overall prospect by Future Watch. Though he eventually was sacrificed in a deal to the Sabres, Byram was clearly a young player on the rise, even if he felt the pressure of being the fourth overall pick by Colorado in 2019.
“I feel like I’ve been through quite a bit,” Byram told Campbell.” I definitely don’t think I performed the way I would have liked to at (training) camp. I wasn’t quite ready for that step. And when I came back, I didn’t totally have the start I wanted to my junior season. I put a lot of pressure on myself. Being a high draft pick, I really wanted to perform well, and I think all of that…just kind of putting too much pressure on myself and not enjoying it kind of piled on top of each other.”
Byram’s father, Shawn Byram, helped his son by managing expectations. While Bowen Byram ultimately didn’t fit into Colorado’s long-term plans, he’s found a home in Buffalo and remains an upper-tier talent on the blueline.
“There’s a lot of pressure and disappointment that goes with not getting as far as you were supposed to,” Shawn Byram said.” I’m trying to help by keeping the pressure off a little bit. Sometimes there are things you’re not in control of, like size and strength, and there are other things you totally control like your work ethic, coachability and being a good teammate. He’s plugging away, and he’s training and working his buns off, and he’s just got to continue it at the next level and hopefully be able to take the next step.”
MILE-HIGH CEILING
Vol. 73, No. 5, March 23, 2020
By Ken Campbell
Some nights turn out to be oil paintings you admire for a day or two. Others you have to grind out just to beat the worst team of the salary-cap era using a third-string goalie you got at the trade deadline. Some nights you’re missing four of your top five scorers and need your captain to get crushed at the blueline to make a play in a 1-1 game. And if you’re lucky, that play ends up on the stick of your 10th-best prospect – Logan O’Connor, 23, son of a former NHLer, signed as a college free agent after playing three years in your backyard – who gets sprung for a breakaway and scores the game-winner. You go back to the room and take a deep breath, revelling in the fact you’ve just won seven straight games, six of them by one goal, and you own a franchise-record nine-game winning streak on the road.
This, all of this, has been a long time coming for the Colorado Avalanche. Remember the Francois Giguere and Greg Sherman years? Yeah, we don’t either. Three years ago, the Avalanche had 48 points and were being run by a guy who seemed to get the job only because he was the greatest player they ever had. And boy, did he look out of his depth for a while. Two of the past three years, they’ve lost the draft lottery and ended up dropping from first to fourth. But here’s the thing: if you think the Avalanche are good now, just wait a couple of years. Or not.
“Our goal is to win the Stanley Cup this year, anything short of that is a failure,” said veteran defenseman Ian Cole. “And that’s the attitude you need to have to be successful every single year. It can’t be, ‘Oh well, let’s just get into the playoffs and we’ll see how it goes.’ No, f— that. It’s, ‘No, we want to win a f—in’ Stanley Cup. Every single f—in’ year. This year, next year, the year after that, 10 years down the road.’”
Cole is 31, with more than 10 years of pro experience and two Stanley Cups, so, according to the collective bargaining agreement, he’s allowed to talk like that. But he really should be watching that potty mouth in the Avs’ dressing room with so many sensitive young ears in there. Martin Kaut is just 20 and can’t even legally buy a beer in Colorado. What’s he going to think? This time a year ago, Cale Makar was walking to class as a sophomore at UMass with a backpack full of books, looking like a kid whose primary goal in life was to fill his hockey sticker book. Tyson Jost and Sam Girard are barely out of short pants.
What we’re trying to say here is the Avalanche are set up for some major success, if not now, certainly not far down the road. The Avs have the No. 1-ranked list of prospects and roster players aged 21-and-under in the NHL in our annual Future Watch edition, which solicited votes from a panel of head amateur scouts and directors of player personnel around the league. More impressively, the Avs have the No. 1-ranked prospect for the second year in a row in defenseman Bowen Byram of the WHL’s Vancouver Giants and Canada’s gold medal-winning world junior team. Last year it was Makar, who has gone on to become a leading Calder Trophy candidate.
And remember those two draft lotteries the Avs lost? They were the same ones in which they chose Makar and Byram, who may very well turn out to be the best players in the 2017 and ’19 drafts. Within days of one another, Byram was named player of the month in the WHL and No. 2 prospect Alex Newhook was pegged as player and rookie of the month in Hockey East. Earlier this season, No. 4 prospect Justus Annunen broke the Finnish Liiga shutout record by not allowing a single goal for 302 minutes and five seconds. And with an average age of 25.7, the Avalanche are already the youngest team in the NHL.
Orchestrating all this is Joe Sakic, the Hall of Fame player who sits atop the Quebec Nordiques/Avalanche franchise list in games, goals, assists, points and streets named after him. After two years working in the front office, he was named executive vice-president of hockey operations in 2013 and was officially handed the keys to the kingdom when he was named GM in 2014. It did not start well. The Avalanche regressed under Sakic, then regressed some more before coach and vice-president of hockey ops Patrick Roy left the organization in 2016.
It took Sakic six months to make a trade of any kind and more than a year to make one of consequence, when he sent Ryan O’Reilly to the Buffalo Sabres in a 2015 deal that has actually aged pretty well for Colorado but was seen as a disaster at the time. Sakic’s first big hire, Jared Bednar as coach, oversaw a tire fire that resulted in the second-worst season in franchise history.
Sakic, the same guy who broke three fingers as a player when he stuck his hand in a snowblower, was gaining a reputation as someone who was great on the ice but was stickhandling the organization into a world of hurt. Keyboard warriors out there could not decide which GM was worse, Sakic or Jim Benning of the Vancouver Canucks. Funny how things can change, eh?
Perhaps it’s because Sakic went a combined minus-102 in his first three seasons and played on some truly god-awful teams before things got much, much better, but there was never any outward sense of panic from him. Neither was there from ownership, which gave Sakic a vote of confidence and did not pressure him to make any transactions to try to win a press conference. He stayed with Bednar when the easiest thing would’ve been to throw his coach overboard and hit the NHL’s recycling bin for someone to replace him.
In case you haven’t noticed, that has become a go-to maneuver for a good number of GMs this season. “I (was) certainly fortunate to be given a second opportunity by Joe after my first year, because it was just…it was a tough year,” Bednar said. “And oftentimes you don’t have someone as patient or as understanding as Joe in that situation.”
Then Sakic made The Trade That Changed Everything, altering the complexion of his roster and setting a course for the Avalanche to stock their organization with young players and prospects. For months and months, the pressure had been mounting for Sakic to trade the disgruntled Matt Duchene, but Sakic insisted he would not make a move under duress for pennies on the dollar. So he waited and a month into the 2017-18 season, finally made the Duchene deal and knocked it out of the park and into another galaxy. The three-way swap involving the Ottawa Senators and Nashville Predators netted the Avalanche a package including Girard, Vladislav Kamenev, the pick they used to take Byram in 2019 and prospect Shane Bowers.
Sakic has clearly established a policy of quality over quantity when making trades, but it’s not just the big moves – like signing Nathan MacKinnon to a seven-year contract that might be the most team-friendly in the NHL today – that have Sakic rolling sevens repeatedly. It’s making an under-the-radar deal for Ryan Graves at the trade deadline in 2019, a player who had logged more than 200 games in the minors for the New York Rangers. Skating with Makar on the Avs’ No. 1 defense pairing, Graves has been one of the league’s most stunning revelations this season and has provided the freewheeling Makar with an almost perfect partner. “My game is pretty quiet,” Graves said. “(Makar) is easy to play with. I think he makes me look good.”
It’s also trading for Andre Burakovsky and signing Valeri Nichushkin as a UFA, trading for Philipp Grubauer and listening to the pro scouts who told Sakic an undrafted 28-year-old netminder named Pavel Francouz could come over from the KHL and play in the best league in the world.
It’s the same with drafting and developing. Sakic has been steadfast in the kinds of players he wants his scouts to procure. He has clearly put a premium on skill and smarts, regardless of position, and knows he can fill out his roster with role players by signing cheap free agents and making minor trades. “We’ve taken Joe’s lead since he took over,” said Alan Hepple, the Avalanche’s director of amateur scouting. “We look for hockey sense and speed. He doesn’t worry about size and things like that. He tells us, ‘Go and look for that, go and try to find that.’ And he’s been really good about letting us do our thing.”
The drafting of No. 1 Future Watch prospect Byram is a perfect example. The Vancouver Giants defenseman, 18, is basically a bigger, more physical version of Makar, a guy who skates well and can produce offense from the back end and can defend and activate into the rush equally well. With Conor Timmins, who is playing in the minors after missing 16 months with a concussion, the Avs were already well stocked with young defensemen, but they were still intent on taking Byram with the fourth pick.
Sakic and the Avalanche realize this is not the plug-and-play NFL or NBA and that prospects are assets who either turn into roster players or become currency in making trades. And the better they are regardless of position, the more leverage the organization is going to have. “I’ve always said to our guys, ‘We don’t play GM when we’re making our list,’” Hepple said. “We try to get the best possible player and give Joe the assets to work with. If he needs to go out and find a winger or centerman or whatever, he’s got assets to work with. I’ve always said, ‘You can’t trade a bad player. You can only trade good ones.’”
Whether Byram ends up ultimately playing for the Avs or is dealt to procure more immediate help, whatever team he ends up with will get a young man with abundant leadership qualities, off-the-charts competitiveness and a non-stop drive train. Ask anyone who has played with him, and they’ll regale you with stories about his constant chatter and utterly joyful approach to the game. This is a guy who chirps teammates and celebrates goals in practice. His skating ability and hockey sense probably come from his grandfather, Randy Gates, who was in the Detroit Red Wings system in the 1960s and played five years in the minors before settling in Cranbrook, B.C.
The competitiveness comes from his father, Shawn, who had a quality ’80s mullet and played five NHL games and hundreds in the minors before taking his career to England, Italy, Austria and Scotland. Shawn played with Mike Modano in junior hockey, Dominik Hasek in the minors and saw the tail end of the New York Islanders’ dynasty team during the five training camps he took part in after being drafted in 1986. He suited up for four of his five NHL career games with the Islanders in 1990-91.
Even though they are almost diametrically opposed as players, Bowen and Shawn are kindred spirits when it comes to their approach to the game. The pure love of what they’re doing supersedes everything else, which is why it came as a surprise that Bowen was in such a funk to start the season. Sent back fairly early from the Avalanche training camp, Byram started to feel the pressure of being the fourth-overall pick, and it was beginning to wear on him.
Bednar said Byram “had an OK training camp for us,” but that wasn’t completely surprising. He was very good in the rookie tournament in Anaheim and in a couple of pre-season games but struggled as the exhibition schedule wore on. Bednar attributed it to not being confident enough to play his own game. “I had some good talks with him throughout training camp,” Bednar said. “I expect him to be much better this year when he comes in based on how he knows what to expect out of the training camp.”
Byram himself acknowledged he had a difficult time in camp and during the early part of the season when he was sent back to the WHL. And Bednar was right. Byram was feeling the pressure of being a highly touted pick and signing a three-year entry-level deal and that prompted him to try to be something he wasn’t on the ice. The result was nobody really got what they were looking for, and Byram was returned to junior.
“I learned at the start of the year what you can be like and what your experience can be like if you’re not having fun,” Byram said. “I feel like I’ve been through quite a bit. I definitely don’t think I performed the way I would have liked to at camp. I wasn’t quite ready for that step. And when I came back, I didn’t totally have the start I wanted to my junior season. I put a lot of pressure on myself. Being a high draft pick, I really wanted to perform well, and I think all of that…just kind of putting too much pressure on myself and not enjoying it kind of piled on top of each other.”
The turning point for Byram came when he was named to Canada’s world junior team. Despite missing the semifinal game with an illness, he returned for the gold-medal game against Russia and was a beast. He logged a mind-boggling 9:14 of ice time in the third period of Canada’s 4-3 win and was out in the last minute to protect the lead. “That helped me to turn the tide of my year and, in the end, change the year for the Giants as well,” Byram said.
When times have been trying for Byram, he has always been able to rely on two of the constants in his hockey life, his father and Mike Dyck, his coach with the Giants. Byram’s relationship with Dyck goes much further back than junior hockey. At a spring hockey tournament in Montana in 2011, Dyck was coaching his 10-year-old son’s team from Lethbridge and noticed a kid from Cranbrook with the last name of Byram and wondered whether he was the kid of a guy he played against in the WHL back in the day. (The 6-foot-4, 210-pound Dyck and the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Shawn Byram even fought once in junior.
“I don’t think either guy got the better of the other,” Shawn said. “If you didn’t score 40 goals and you were 6-foot-3, you had that physical side that you pretty well had to play with. Not that I was that great at it.”) It turned out to indeed be Shawn Byram’s son, and the two got talking. That led to Bowen Byram joining Dyck’s spring team and competing in tournaments with them for a few years. And when it came to playing bantam hockey, with no elite programs in Cranbrook, Byram went three hours northeast to Lethbridge to play for Dyck’s AAA team. That forced the Byrams to get a residence in Lethbridge, and they made it work without uprooting the entire family.
Shawn, a coal miner who works in Sparwood, B.C., which is equidistant between Cranbrook and Lethbridge, stayed with his son on his days off, but Bowen lived full-time with his grandmother in Lethbridge from age 13 to 16 before joining the Giants for the 2017-18 WHL season. In Byram’s case, it definitely took a village to raise a future NHLer. “We’ve been very lucky, because a lot of families make the sacrifices we’ve made and it doesn’t work out,” Shawn said. “He has a long way to go, but it’s really worked out so far.”
Shawn has seen enough elite players at all levels to know that there are no guarantees of NHL success, even when you’re a No. 4 overall pick. That’s why he has always tried to temper expectations and keep things low-key when it came to his son. Shawn has seen plenty of players who were great as teenagers fail to develop. He played junior hockey with a few and saw players in the minors who were good but not quite good enough to play in the NHL. He comes from a place of immeasurable perspective. That’s why, when others get a little too caught up in telling his son how special he is, Shawn sees his duty more as managing expectations than giving his son any guidance on what to do on the ice.
“I did try to minimize the pressure a little bit,” Shawn said. “And you get people saying, ‘Oh, you’re not giving him enough credit.’ I’m making sure people know there’s a long way to go. There’s a lot of pressure and disappointment that goes with not getting as far as you were supposed to. I’m trying to help by keeping the pressure off a little bit. Sometimes there are things you’re not in control of, like size and strength, and there are other things you totally control like your work ethic, coachability and being a good teammate. He’s plugging away, and he’s training and working his buns off, and he’s just got to continue it at the next level and hopefully be able to take the next step.”
No, there are no guarantees, either for Bowen Byram or the Colorado Avalanche. Because potential, even when it’s massive, does not always translate to success. Just ask the Winnipeg Jets. But Byram and the Avs have set themselves up for some special things in the future. Half the fun will be watching their journeys to try to get there.
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