Cup-Winning Colorado Avalanche Promote Joe Sakic To President, Chris McFarland To GM

A championship has led to changes in the Colorado Avalanche front office.

On Monday, the organization announced that general manager Joe Sakic has been promoted to the position of president of hockey operations. Assistant general manager Chris McFarland moves up into the GM chair.

The moves were widely expected. McFarland, 52, has been regarded as a strong candidate for an NHL general manager job for the last few years. But he has been such an integral part of Colorado’s organization that the club declined to give him permission to interview for job openings on other teams — leading to speculation that he’d be promoted internally.

Meanwhile, Sakic, 53, has earned his ascent to the president’s position after more than a decade in the Avalanche’s front office. Following his retirement as a player in 2009, he began his management career with two seasons as an executive advisor to then-GM Greg Sherman in 2011. He assumed his current responsibilities in 2013.

A lifelong member of the organization as a player, Sakic was drafted 15th overall by the Quebec Nordiques in 1987 and played seven seasons in Quebec before the franchise relocated to Denver in 1995. He sits first in the organization’s history in games played (1,378), goals (625), assists (1,016) and points (1,641). He served as captain for 17 seasons, the second-longest tenure in NHL history, and helped lead Colorado to Stanley Cup wins in 1996 and 2001.

Sakic won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP in 1996 and the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP in 2001. A member of the Triple Gold Club, he was also named most valuable player when he won Olympic gold with Team Canada in 2002.

He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2012, in his first year of eligibility.

Now, Sakic moves on at the pinnacle of his managerial success — with his first championship as an executive after the Avalanche defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning in six games in the 2022 Stanley Cup Final. On Day 1 of the draft in Montreal last Thursday, Sakic also received the Jim Gregory Award as the NHL’s general manager of the year, beating out Julien BriseBois of the Lightning and Chris Drury of the New York Rangers.

While Sakic has received the lion’s share of the credit for transforming the Avalanche into a powerhouse organization, McFarland has been by his side for the last seven seasons.

He came on board at the beginning of the 2015-16 season, in the midst of a nine-year stretch where Colorado missed the playoffs seven times. But after bottoming out with a league-worst 48 points in 2016-17, the Avalanche’s fortunes began to turn. The club has now reached the playoffs for the last five consecutive seasons, shared the Presidents’ Trophy as the best regular-season team with the Vegas Golden Knights in 2020-21, and set a franchise record with 119 regular-season points in 2021-22.

A native of the Bronx, New York, McFarland played college hockey at Pace University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business as well as a law degree. He got his start in hockey management by working as an intern at the NHL’s head office in New York while he was a student. After graduating from law school, he joined the Columbus Blue Jackets as their director of hockey operations ahead of their debut as an expansion franchise in 2000.

After six seasons in that role, McFarland was named the Blue Jackets’ assistant general manager in 2007. He served in that capacity for eight additional years, and added general manager duties for the AHL’s Springfield Falcons in his last two years before moving over to Colorado.

While he was with Columbus, McFarland worked in nearly every facet of the organization, according to the Avalanche’s press release. Those duties included “scouting at the professional and amateur level, player contract negotiations, salary cap management and arbitration, collective bargaining agreement administration, budgeting and team scheduling issues.”

That experience was invaluable in helping to turn around the Avalanche over the last five years. The process has included savvy drafting of young talents like Cale Makar, Alex Newhook and Bowen Byram, smart trades including the acquisition of Nazem Kadri and Devon Toews along with 2022 deadline deals for key Stanley Cup contributors Andrew Cogliano, Artturi Lekhonen and Josh Manson, and grinding contract negotiations that have kept the team within its budget, including locking up captain Gabriel Landeskog for eight years at a cap hit of $7 million in 2021, on the eve of his opportunity to test unrestricted free agency.

McFarland’s name might not be well known by fans, but his work has earned him an excellent reputation in hockey circles. According to hockey insider Pierre LeBrun of TSN and The Athletic, the Anaheim Ducks and San Jose Sharks both requested permission to interview him for their open GM positions earlier this year, but did not receive it.

Now, rather than starting a rebuild with a new club, McFarland will have the opportunity to work with the roster he helped craft. But that’s no easy assignment.

While CapFriendly shows the Avalanche with more than $20 million in available salary-cap space as of Monday, there are some big decisions looming as early as this week.

Planning starts with the contract extension that Nathan MacKinnon can sign any time after NHL free agency opens this Wednesday. The heartbeat of the Avalanche, the 26-year-old is entering the last season of a bargain seven-year deal that carries a cap hit of $6.3 million.

With that bit of business lurking in the background, McFarland will need to make decisions on whether to bring back any or all of Kadri, Manson, Valeri Nichushkin, or Andre Burakovsky — all of whom are headed toward unrestricted free agency on July 13. In addition, Lehkonen is a restricted free agent with arbitration rights who will be looking for a significant raise over the $2.3 million he made last season.

One area that has been addressed is goaltending. With Darcy Kuemper also headed to free agency and high demand for quality netminders around the league, the Avalanche acquired Alexandar Georgiev from the New York Rangers in exchange for three draft picks last Thursday. On Sunday, Georgiev was signed to a three-year contract with a cap hit of $3.4 million. He and Pavel Francouz will form Colorado’s goaltending tandem next season.

As is common for teams in their championship window, Colorado’s stock of draft picks is now running thin. The club made just two picks in last week’s draft — in the sixth and seventh round. The Avalanche have also already traded away three of their seven picks in both the 2023 and 2024 drafts.