The legendary coach who swept the Avs made a case to keep Jared Bednar

A Presidents' Trophy. A sweep. An expiring contract. Even an endorsement from the coach who just beat him may not save Jared Bednar's job in Colorado.

BY JAKE SHAPIRO

May 26, 2026, 11:11 PM Updated: 11:12 pm

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If you were looking for the most interesting quote about Jared Bednar’s future on Tuesday night, it didn’t come from a player. It didn’t come from Joe Sakic. It came from the interim coach who just swept him.

John Tortorella, never one to filter a thought, offered this unsolicited defense of his coaching peer:

“I know people are crawling up Bedsy’s ass about this, that and the other, but he is one hell of a coach. He has a great staff there. I was very nervous, we knew how we had to play because of how potent they are. Great organization, great team.”

That’s a heat shield from one of the most respected voices in the sport. It’s also probably not going to matter.

Because make no mistake: this might be it for Bednar in Colorado.

A Stanley Cup-winning head coach with the second-longest tenure in the NHL just got swept out of the conference final by an opponent his own captain admitted made them “find ways to lose hockey games.” A team that won the Presidents’ Trophy in the regular season scored seven goals in four games. Bednar himself called it a series where the Avs “didn’t find enough solutions to what they were doing.”

In any other organization — like Vegas, who fired their coach late in the season — that’s exactly what would happen: changes. The Golden Knights made Tortorella their fourth coach in nine years, despite a ton of success along the way. In turn, the team is 18-4-1 since he took over, lifting them from a club that almost missed the postseason to four wins away from the Stanley Cup.

That’s the cold truth of the modern NHL. Even great coaches get moved when the ceiling stops rising.

Tortorella’s right that Bednar is a hell of a coach. The banner in the rafters proves it. The body of work proves it. And to his credit, Bednar didn’t hide from the result Tuesday night, accepting the loss while crediting Vegas as “a well-oiled machine right now, peaking at the right time.”

But the further this group has gotten from 2022, the harder it’s become to ignore the pattern of disappointments — especially against physical, defensive teams that take away time and space. Vegas just did it. Dallas did it. The blueprint to beat the Avalanche in the playoffs isn’t a secret anymore, and the Avs haven’t found the answer.

And when the locker room starts using words like “humiliating” and “waste,” changes tend to follow — even for a hell of a coach with a hell of a staff.

Tortorella said his piece. It was generous.

It also might not save anybody.

Because Bednar now enters next year in the final season of his contract, and that usually means this is the summer to extend or move on. Teams like to avoid lame-duck coaches almost as much as they like to avoid difficult decisions.

The Avalanche are about to be forced into one about the best head coach in franchise history.

Tortorella made the case for keeping Bednar.

The scoreboard made the case for moving on from Bednar.