One week ago, the Colorado Avalanche looked like a team that was destined to win the Stanley Cup.

Now, they’re cleaning out their lockers after one of the most stunning collapses in franchise history.

For months, the Avalanche looked like the team to beat. They won the Presidents’ Trophy. They overwhelmed opponents with their speed and skill. They rolled through the first two rounds of the playoffs and entered the Western Conference Final as heavy favorites.

Four games later, they were swept.

Not beaten. Swept.

It’s easy to look at Vegas and say the Golden Knights simply got hot at the right time. And there’s some truth to that. Vegas played an outstanding series and did exactly what it needed to do.

But that’s not the whole story.

Colorado spent much of the season showing signs of the problems that eventually caught up with it. Those issues were easy to overlook when the Avalanche were winning at an absurd rate and piling up points in the standings.

They became impossible to ignore once the games started getting tighter and the margin for error disappeared.

And no, this has nothing to do with some mythical Presidents’ Trophy curse.

The Presidents’ Trophy isn’t cursed. It’s a trophy. You make your own destiny. And the Avalanche made theirs.

Throughout the season, there were warning signs hiding beneath all those wins. If you watched our interviews throughout the year, you heard the same things come up again and again: poor puck management, defensive-zone turnovers, sloppy play and too many unforced mistakes.

The difference was that Colorado usually had a safety net.

Scott Wedgewood would make a ridiculous save. Mackenzie Blackwood would bail them out after a defensive breakdown. Nathan MacKinnon would score a goal and suddenly nobody cared about the turnover that happened three shifts earlier.

That’s what winning does. It makes flaws easier to ignore.

Until it doesn’t.

Against Vegas, it felt like everything hit at once. The offense stopped scoring. The goaltending advantage disappeared. The power play went quiet. The injuries piled up. Every problem that had been covered up by elite talent and timely saves was suddenly impossible to miss.

Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong.

Nathan MacKinnon didn’t score a goal in the series.

Think about that.

The most dominant even-strength player in hockey went four games without scoring, and Colorado never found a way to compensate for it.

Watching Colorado over the final three games of this series reminded me of Oscar De La Hoya’s welterweight fight against Manny Pacquiao in 2008.

On paper, it was supposed to be a massive showdown between two stars.

What people forget is what De La Hoya had gone through just to get there. He hadn’t fought at 147 pounds in years, and his training camp was spent getting his body down to the weight. By fight night, he looked depleted. Pacquiao took over almost immediately, and De La Hoya had no answer for the pace or the pressure.

At one point, the late Emmanuel Steward — one of the greatest trainers in boxing history and a former coach of De La Hoya — watched the fight unfold and gave a brutally honest assessment:

“He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to do at all.”

Watching Colorado against Vegas, it was hard not to think about that quote.

The Golden Knights kept punching. The Avalanche kept taking the punches. And they never found an adjustment that changed the fight.

Vegas clogged the middle of the ice and dared Colorado to beat them from the outside.

Colorado kept trying.

Vegas erased a third-period lead in Game 2. Colorado looked stunned. Vegas came back again in Game 3. Colorado looked stunned again.

For a team that had entered the third period with a lead and won 41 consecutive regular-season games, along with four more in the playoffs, the inability to respond was remarkable.

“I think we let Games 2 and 3 slip away from us,” Logan O’Connor said. “Super uncharacteristic from our group to give up the leads like that, especially in consecutive games.”

The concerning part wasn’t just that Colorado lost those games.

It was what happened afterward.

The confidence seemed to disappear. The swagger was gone. By Game 4, the Avalanche looked like a team waiting for something bad to happen.

Then it did.

A lot of the attention will naturally fall on Nathan MacKinnon. That’s what happens when a superstar goes quiet on the biggest stage.

But he wasn’t the only one.

Martin Necas was supposed to be the connector, the secondary engine who could make teams pay for putting so much attention on MacKinnon. Instead, Vegas pushed him to the outside and took away his ability to attack the middle.

Brock Nelson generated chances but couldn’t finish them. At times, he looked like a player pressing for offense that simply wasn’t coming. In 20 playoff games with Colorado, he has just two goals, both of them empty-netters.

But the individual cases almost don’t matter at this point.

The bigger problem was that Colorado got virtually nothing from its depth scoring.

And when MacKinnon stopped scoring, there was nobody there to pick up the slack.

There’s a temptation to look at this series and identify one reason Colorado lost.

It wasn’t one thing.

It was everything.

The power play struggled for much of the season and carried those problems into the postseason. Puck-management issues that showed up in November were still there in May. Defensive-zone breakdowns never completely went away.

The Avalanche survived those problems because they had enough elite talent to overcome them.

Vegas took that away.

The Golden Knights defended with structure and patience. They clogged the middle of the ice, forced Colorado to the outside and waited for mistakes.

And Colorado kept giving them opportunities.

You can point to the injuries. You can point to the goaltending. You can point to bad breaks.

All of those things mattered.

But great teams are ultimately defined by what they consistently do, not what they’re capable of doing on their best nights.

For months, Colorado’s flaws were survivable.

Against Vegas, they were decisive.

Even the goaltending story fits that pattern. Scott Wedgewood earned his role with a strong season, but Carter Hart consistently outplayed Colorado’s goaltenders throughout the series. When Mackenzie Blackwood finally delivered Colorado’s best performance in Game 4, it came too late and with too little support in front of him.

By then, the series was already gone.

Vegas, meanwhile, kept getting better. Its health improved. Its execution tightened. Its confidence grew.

That’s how you end up with a sweep in a series that was supposed to be competitive.

Not because of fate.

Not because of a curse.

Because one team found ways to adjust, and the other one never did.

And once the punches started landing, Colorado never found a way to punch back.