Jared Bednar has already won at every stop that has mattered to his career, and Colorado is asking him to do it again. As the Avalanche prepare for the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs, the coach who lifted the Kelly Cup, the Calder Cup and the Stanley Cup now sits at the center of the latest push for another championship.
Bednar won the Kelly Cup with the South Carolina Stingrays in his second season as head coach, then added the Calder Cup in 2016 and the Stanley Cup in 2022. That trail matters now because the Avalanche have failed to get past the second round in the past three tournaments, and a second title would answer the sharpest criticism hanging over the team. Cale Makar and the rest of Colorado’s core know the standard is no longer making the field; it is finishing the job.
The path to that standard started long before Denver. Bednar spent nearly a decade playing and coaching for the Stingrays in the ECHL, after a journeyman playing career that took him through four WHL teams, two ECHL teams and a year in the IHL before he settled in with South Carolina. Jason Fitzsimmons gave him his first coaching job there, and Bryan Maxwell had already left a mark on him years earlier as his coach with Spokane in the WHL. Later, Bednar worked under Jim Playfair and Brad Larsen as an AHL assistant, and he said he was always fortunate to be surrounded by good people and learned something from all of them.
That early South Carolina chapter still sticks with Brett Marietti, who remembered Bednar as a young head coach with a hard edge and a clear code. Marietti said Bednar put a player on waivers after he arrived late as the team was leaving North Charleston on a road trip. The team went to the game, won, and then Bednar made the move. Marietti said the Stingrays ended up winning the championship after that, and it was the kind of decision that told him Bednar was serious about how professionals should act.
The contrast between then and now is part of what makes Colorado’s run so interesting. Bednar’s style has stayed detail-oriented and rule-driven, but the stakes have grown with every postseason disappointment. The Avalanche are not trying to prove he can coach; they are trying to prove his methods can carry them beyond the second round and back to the sport’s final stage.
Bednar has said he takes a little from every coach he has had, from the people he met at NHL coaching conferences to the teams and opponents that helped shape his own style. That background is now in the spotlight again, because in Denver the question is not whether he knows how to build a winner. It is whether he can turn all those lessons into one more Cup before the window tightens further.
