To start this article, I’d like to apologize to social scientists everywhere for my probably very improper survey and analysis techniques. In my defense, I am a future chemist and not a sociologist (for now). With that being said, as an aromantic sort-of lesbian, I’ve often pondered what, exactly, makes a man “objectively” attractive to the general public. For example, why do straight men apparently love Ryan Reynolds so much? To help me find an answer to this question, I’ve conducted very serious and real science over the past few weeks to determine the group-sourced hottest man on the Colorado Avalanche, my favorite sports team.
To collect my data, I had 20 respondents from around the United States (but mostly in Beloit) fill out a tier list of the 2024-25 Avalanche roster based on their own subjective opinion of so-called attractiveness, whatever that meant to them. There were no guidelines other than to rank every one of the 24 players on the list in the default five tiers and send me a picture of their ranking. I then assigned a point value to each tier, with the highest S tier earning 5 points and the lowest F tier earning 1 point. The numbers I will reference from here are the total sum of points earned for that player based on a total maximum of 100 (5×20) and a minimum of 20 (1×20). I noted that multiple respondents chose not to put anyone in the S tier of their ranking, meaning it became impossible to earn that total maximum number of points. Why, you might ask, did I not use the Avalanche roster from after the trade deadline this year? The answer is simple: I’m too lazy to create my own tier list, and someone on the internet made one that was apparently accurate to the team roster as of March 31, 2025, so I used that. Thanks, Tiermaker.com user Lu Abu.
Many of the players on this tier list are no longer part of the Avalanche organization, as you would expect from over a year’s worth of personnel changes. Therefore, I collected data on Jonathan Drouin (now with STL), Kevin Mandolese (Slovak Extraliga), Charlie Coyle (CBJ), Miles Wood (CBJ), Jimmy Vesey (Swiss NL), Ryan Lindgren (SEA), and Samuel Girard (PIT), who are all now part of different organizations, as well as Keaton Middleton, who is currently playing with the Avalanche AHL affiliate, the Colorado Eagles. Erik Johnson also retired at the end of last season. The other 15 guys are still with the Avs currently. This list also did not include Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin, who were on injured reserve at the time of creation of this list and thus were not considered part of the active roster. So I guess my research isn’t as up-to-date as I had initially hoped.
Drum roll, please… The collectively-chosen hottest man on the Colorado Avalanche is 27-year-old defenseman Sam Malinski, an undrafted player to the NHL and a former captain of Cornell University’s hockey team before his graduation in 2023. He’s also the Avs’ 2026 King Clancy Memorial Trophy nominee, the league-wide award for humanitarian efforts and community engagement. Does being kind and working harder than other people in order to achieve your dreams make you hotter? Likely so.
In fact, that hypothesis is corroborated by the next two highest players on the list, Jonathan Drouin and Parker Kelly. Kelly, another undrafted talent, came to Colorado from the Ottawa Senators as a free agent before the 2024-25 season. Since then, he’s experienced massive growth as a player and earned his spot as the darling of Altitude TV broadcasters and Avalanche beat reporters alike. They just named a whale after him and another after his wife. Drouin, on the other hand, never lived up to his third overall draft status in the NHL, but put up career-high numbers in his two seasons spent in Colorado trying to revitalize his play. At least being drafted the year after Nail Yakupov saved him from being considered a TOTAL bust.
The player with the least number of attractiveness points is Olympic gold medalist Brock Nelson, who is only 34 years old, but kind of looks like someone’s old and fragile grandfather. Despite his somewhat ancient appearance, Nelson has become a clutch player for the Avalanche, putting up 33 goals so far this season. In general, the blond players on the roster all scored lower, which tells me that blond men are usually evil. Also, it can’t be a coincidence that Malinski and Kelly, two of the three youngest players on the Avalanche at the time, were considered the most attractive by a sampling of 16-22 year olds.
Finally, I’d also argue that using headshots of each player doesn’t necessarily do them justice, considering they’re often really bad pictures. Many of my respondents judged photos based on whether or not the player was smiling, and spoiler alert, a majority of them did not smile in these photos. If I had any more time and energy, I might try to pick out a good photo of every player to even the playing field, but this project took me multiple hours of counting as it is and I do, in fact, have other things going on in my life. So, did this teach me more about what makes a man hot? Not entirely. Did I have fun doing it? Absolutely.
The roster I used and the score that each person obtained: Sam Malinski-83; Jonathan Drouin-80; Parker Kelly-76; Charlie Coyle-71; Ross Colton-67; Kevin Mandolese-65; Scott Wedgewood-63; Cale Makar-63; Mackenzie Blackwood-61; Keaton Middleton-56; Miles Wood-49; Samuel Girard-47; Martin Necas-47; Nathan MacKinnon-44; Jack Drury-44; Devon Toews-41; Jimmy Vesey-41; Josh Manson-41; Artturi Lehkonen-32; Ryan Lindgren-30; Erik Johnson-29; Logan O’Connor-28; Joel Kiviranta-25; Brock Nelson-22. Current Avalanche players that were not on the list: Gabriel Landeskog, Valeri Nichushkin, Nazem Kadri, Brett Kulak, Nick Blankenburg, Brent Burns, Zakhar Bardakov, Nicolas Roy.
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