The Avalanche coaching search continues with Colorado general manager Joe Sakic seeking a “teacher”-type who can nurture the franchise’s younger players and get the most out of the much-cited and much-challenged “core.”

Brad Larsen, the former Avalanche winger who now is an assistant under John Tortorella at Columbus, is in the mix, along with two current AHL head coaches — Jared Bednar of the Cleveland Monsters and Travis Green of the Utica Comets — plus New York Rangers associate coach Scott Arniel and Washington Capitals assistant Lane Lambert.

Larsen previously has been an AHL head coach, with the Springfield Falcons. Arniel is a former Blue Jackets head coach who was an AHL head coach at Manitoba and Chicago, and Lambert also was an AHL head coach with Milwaukee.

The AHL emphasis isn’t exactly a revolutionary approach, either: Marc Crawford, Bob Hartley and Joe Sacco all moved up from the AHL to become Quebec/Colorado head coaches.

Interviews and inclusion in a coaching search sometimes can be courtesies. But with assistant general manager Chris MacFarland, who came to the Avalanche from the Blue Jackets, obviously gaining power in the front office and having access to Sakic’s ear, the Columbus connection is both obvious and curious. The Blue Jackets, after all, have made the playoffs twice in their 15 seasons of existence.

Whoever gets the job won’t be coaching a “young core.”

It involves definition of terms, but Matt Duchene is 25 and about to enter his eighth NHL season. Gabe Landeskog turns 24 in November and 2016-17 will be his sixth season. Erik Johnson is 28 and this season will be his ninth in the league. Even Nathan MacKinnon, who will turn 21 on September 1, is going into his fourth season.

But going down the roster, the teaching challenges will be monumental, with such players as Mikko Rantanen, Chris Bigras and Nikita Zadorov being counted on to make significant contributions in 2016-17. It’s strange, because only three years ago, this seemed to be a franchise reaping the benefits of a successful rebuilding on the fly.

This is Rebuilding 2.0.

There’s a lot of revisionist history going on about this, primarily because Patrick Roy’s primary identity was as a Hall of Fame goaltender who raised the Stanley Cup overhead four times, twice in Colorado. But he also had paid his dues in eight seasons as a coach on the major junior level, where the motivational strategies range from (figuratively speaking) a foot in the posterior, a consoling arm around the shoulder during pangs of homesickness or girlfriend problems, and dangling the carrot of the NHL in front of the players during bag skates.

He was a first-time NHL coach, and if his name was Jones, this would have been the case of the Avalanche taking a chance on a major junior coach.

So he came back to Denver with a reputation as a teacher — a gruff and sharp-tongued one at times, but a teacher nonetheless. I get the Avalanche’s quest to hire a coach with that teacher reputation, but it’s unfair to Roy to interpret that as a response to Roy being deficient in that department. I’m not even saying the Avalanche are encouraging that inference; rather, I’m saying that it’s a reflexive tendency to assume that in the cycle of hiring, the next choice is a 180-degree antidote to his predecessor. That is, a players’ coach/manager always must be succeeded by a disciplinarian, who always must be succeeded by a players’ coach/manager, who always….

Whether Roy’s message was getting across after the spectacular over-achievement of the 112-point season in 2013-14 — when the Avs went from 29th in the league the season before to third overall — is a fair question. But this was no Magic Johnson, Larry Bird or Wayne Gretzky walking into a coaching job without an internship and being frustrated as a former superstar not understanding his players’ shortcomings, whether in talent or resolve.

Among the many challenges of coaching in the modern NHL are allowing the young talents to take advantage of their skill, and not stifling them, but also to emphasize that they must strike a balance between that improvisation and responsibility. That’s all very tricky.

And yes, that’s teaching.