Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke ranked in the top third of NHL owners

Stan Kroenke is a very familiar name for Denver sports fans. He owns the Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Rapids and Colorado Mammoth, along with a handful of other teams and businesses outside of the state of Colorado. Recently, The Athletic recently ranked all the owners in the NHL, and Kroenke was 7th on the list.

The 77-year-old has been the majority owner of the Avalanche since 2000 and has seen a lot of successful hockey during his tenure as the owner. Since the turn of the century, Colorado has the fourth-most wins in the NHL (1,027), while the team is tied for the third in playoff appearances (16) and is one of seven teams to win multiple Stanley Cups.

Kroenke’s overall grade was an A-, and his top-ranked category was organizational stability. With Nathan MacKinnon under contract until 2031 and Cale Makar under contract until 2027, the Avalanche will at least be in playoff contention every year in the near future. Along with that, Gabe Landeskog has been around since 2011 and Erik Johnson has been around since 2010 (minus a brief stint away).

Don’t forget about head coach Jared Bednar as well, who has been at the helm of the Avalanche since August 2016. He is the third-longest tenured head coach in the league, behind Pittsburgh’s Mike Sullivan and Tampa Bay’s Jon Cooper. There have been 28 teams who have hired a new coach since 2022, an astonishing number. Colorado is just one of four teams with stability at the most important spot on the bench.

If players are important to this organization, Kroenke makes sure to keep them in Colorado. Most of the time.

Another category that Kroenke was ranked inside the top 10 in was franchise vision, which goes hand-in-hand with organizational stability. If the organization is stable with key players and other members locked in for the future, then the vision is to win Stanley Cups.

Other categories in the rankings included willingness to spend and treatment of the fan base, which Kroenke was ranked 16th and 21st in, respectively.

The willingness to spend ranking may have been hurt by the recent Mikko Rantanen debacle in which the two sides couldn’t agree on the right number to keep him in Colorado. However, this isn’t the MLB, and there is still a salary cap that Kroenke and the rest of the front office have to keep in mind, especially with Makar being eligible for a contract extension starting in July.

The treatment of the fan base is a very interesting category here, and most of the ranking is thanks to the Altitude-Comcast saga. Obviously, no fan was happy that they had to jump through 50 hoops just to watch their team win a Stanley Cup. While the two sides recently came to an agreement to get the Avalanche and Nuggets back on Denver’s largest cable provider, it came after almost six years in which fans weren’t able to watch their respective teams win championships and perform at the highest level.

The Athletic also polled fans’ confidence in their team’s owner from 2024 to 2025. 86% of Avalanche fans said that they have the same amount of confidence in Kroenke as they did in 2024, while 5% had more and 9% had less.

On a scale to five, Kroenke received a score of 4.07 from the fans and 4.40 from The Athletic, giving him an overall grade of 4.20. This shows that while the team might not be winning the Stanley Cup every single year, they are still in a much better position than many other teams in the NHL thanks to ownership.

The Avalanche are currently in third place in the Central Division in the Western Conference, and are poised to make it to the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the eighth-consecutive year.