Avalanche Letting Top-6 Forward Head To Free Agency

The Colorado Avalanche appear to have a few tricks up their sleeve as free agency is about to open. The team made a trade to send Charlie Coyle and Miles Wood to the Columbus Blue Jackets and free up a fair bit of cap space. The Avalanche now sit at $9 million in projected cap space with some players to sign.

Someone who doesn’t appear to be in their plans moving forward is Jonathan Drouin. He had two productive bounce-back years in Colorado after struggling in Montreal for the final three years before joining the Avalanche. Allan Walsh said that Drouin will be going to the free agency market on July 1.

The 30-year-old Drouin registered 30 goals and 93 points in 122 regular season games over the past two seasons playing in the top-6 for Colorado. While it helped he was with some elite talent, it showed he turned his career back around regardless.

Drouin was back producing on the power-play, logging a lot of minutes, but also saw injuries keep him out of half of this season as he only got into 43 games. He plays a clean game and is absolutely a top-6 winger that will get lots of attention. Depending on how much he’s asking for in free agency, plenty of teams will throw their hat in the mix.

The Avalanche have their top-6 set again with Gabriel Landeskog back playing games, so it makes sense to save the money to use elsewhere instead of paying Drouin more than what his role will be moving forward on the team.

I think that the Avalanche and Drouin will both be fine and it was a lucrative deal for the veteran to get his career back on track for the last couple of seasons in Colorado.