Former All-Star forward says he’ll retire after this Avalanche season

Zach Parise will play his 1,254th and final regular season game on Thursday night as the Colorado Avalanche forward told the Denver Post that he’ll be retiring for good at season’s end.

Parise will have played 30 games with the Avs, joining the team in January after being out of work through the offseason and into the first part of the season. Parise is a major figure in USA Hockey, the last captain of an NHL roster that played medaled for Team USA at an Olympics. Now ten years later, Parise will hope to finish his career by winning his first Stanley Cup.

The Avalanche are amongst the favorites to win it all this year in the NHL but their recent performance means they’ll be on the road for most of the postseason. And that starts possibly this weekend against the Winnipeg Jets.

Parise was the 17th pick in the 2003 NHL Draft and is the sixth player from his class to still be playing in the NHL 21 years later. The now 39-year-old winger has added nine points with the Avs to his career tallies of 433 goals and tallied 455 assists.

Parise became one of the more prolific forwards in the sport, leading the Devils in 2011-12 to the Stanley Cup Final. The next offseason, Parise signed a 13-year, $98 million deal with the Wild. He remained a productive player for most of his nine seasons in his home state of Minnesota but was eventually bought out by the Wild. Before joining Colorado, he spent two years with the Islanders.

The Avs will hope Parise’s strong playoff resume can help them in the coming postseason. He’s played 111 playoff games with 80 points scored.

Parise has had some giant moments in his career. He led the Americans to their first World Junior title in 2003, tallied key points for the Devils late in the playoffs and scored the game-tying goal for the Americans with 24 seconds left in the Gold Medal Game of the 2010 Olympics. Parise though, hasn’t had that crowning moment in over 20 years, falling short to the Kings while playing for the Devils and losing to Team Canada both as an alternate captain in the 2010 Olympics and then again as the captain to Canada in the 2014 Olympics semifinals. Colorado hockey fans are looking for one more signature moment out of Parise, this time where he can hoist hardware.