Miles Wood has cleared waivers, and that is not a footnote the Colorado Avalanche can simply shrug off. It is the latest consequence of a deal that was always about damage control, not elegance, and it leaves a 31-year-old forward sitting in a very awkward place after failing to make the Columbus Blue Jackets this season.
The summer of 2025 was already a reminder that the Avalanche were dealing with a hard cap crunch. They traded Miles Wood and moved Charlie Coyle to the Columbus Blue Jackets to clear space, a move that said plenty about how tight things had become. When a club starts shifting useful players just to get breathing room, nobody should pretend it is a clean reset. It is a forced one.
Three years left, and no easy answer
That is what makes this so uncomfortable for Colorado. Miles Wood had signed a six-year deal in Colorado worth $15 million, and three remaining years are still part of the picture. This is the ugly side of roster building: the contract does not disappear just because the fit has changed or the player has moved on.
Wood was also part of the Roaring 20s line, and that matters because it underlines how much has already changed around him. Two of the three members are gone now, first Miles Wood and then Ross Colton. That kind of turnover does not happen by accident. It is usually the result of a team trying to fix a cap situation that had become impossible to ignore.
And yet the football-logic equivalent here is brutally simple: if a player cannot make the Columbus Blue Jackets after that trade, and then clears waivers, his standing has taken a serious hit. That does not mean the player has suddenly become useless. It does mean the margin for error around him is far thinner than it used to be.
The Avalanche needed to clear cap space, and that much is obvious. The tougher truth is that clearing space often comes with a cost, and Wood is now part of that bill. The move may have been necessary in the summer of 2025, but the aftermath is exactly what makes these decisions sting: the money still exists, the years still exist, and the clean solution never really arrives.
So yes, Miles Wood cleared waivers. But the bigger story is that the Colorado Avalanche are still living with the consequences of a tough cap-crunch move, and there is nothing glamorous about that.
