Nathan MacKinnon is on one right now.
He has 17 points (six goals, 11 assists) in his past 10 games and 29 points (14 goals, 15 assists) in his previous 18 contests at home. He’s also ranked sixth in the NHL with 90 points, a mark he’s now reached four times in his 10 seasons.
You want more? No. 29 has 127 points (47 goals, 80 assists) in the last 365 days of regular-season hockey, which puts him sixth among his peers, and he’s recorded 56 points (22 goals, 34 assists) since the calendar turned over to 2023. Only Connor McDavid has more.
MacKinnon has more points in fewer games this year than last. The Colorado Avalanche will go as he goes, with the help of beast-mode Mikko Rantanen, brick-wall Alexandar Georgiev, and a rotating cast of supporting characters.
That much is evident when speaking to his friends, colleagues, opponents, and even casual watchers of this hockey team.
“To compete against him, I think it’s always a big challenge. I think it’s probably even bigger, especially the way he’s playing right now,” MacKinnon confidant Sidney Crosby said on Tuesday. “He’s played at a high level for a long time, but I think this has got to be up there. You’ve seen him do that in the playoffs, but this is pretty close to the best I’ve seen him play.”
Despite the odd loss here or there, perhaps the occasional playing with their food that goes wrong, this may be close to your Avs squad from yesteryear, and the MacKinnons and Rantanens are making the case despite the never-ending list of injuries that keep piling on.
There have been prolonged winning stretches of late, the most recent being six consecutive games without a loss until Wednesday’s 5-2 defeat at the hands of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The team is 13-4-1 in their last 18 matches and 21-6-3 in their last 30.
They’ve lost just six games in regulation and two in overtime in 2023. That doesn’t mean there’s no room to grow and improve, but it does seem like they’ve bottled some hunger up and have been using it to climb the ladder in the Western Conference.
How exactly are they doing it? Learning from this year, last year, the year before, and so on for as long as they can remember.
“We lost four or five there, gave up seven a couple nights in a row, and then rebounded and we’ve responded really well,” head coach Jared Bednar said recently. “So we’ve been in this position before. We’ve been out of the playoffs. We’ve climbed up a couple times. Didn’t handle it great last time. I think that’s when we lost four or five, so hopefully we learn from it and that we continue to play the way it’s given us success. And that to me is a lot of determination, a lot of commitment to defend, and getting on our toes a little bit more offensively, and getting a little bit more dangerous throughout our lineup. We’ve got some depth scoring, our top guys are still cooking along pretty good.”
It starts with the leaders of the team, the engine driving the squad on the ice and in the dressing room. It comes from the experiences of those ups and downs and struggles and triumphs, including last season’s determination to go all the way, whatever it took.
“We found ourselves out of a playoff spot, near the bottom of the division, and that stretch that I was just talking about it, we had some meetings and talk about where we needed to get to, and not just getting in the playoffs, but focusing on some of the things we focused on last year when it comes to our habits and our details and our competitiveness,” Bednar said. “It’s not just about getting to the playoffs. It’s about being able to win when you get there and making sure your game’s in order.
“So our focus has kind of always been big picture on doing what we need to do that’s going to be successful when we get to the playoffs. Tracking down teams in front of us and doing it the right way, and hopefully [we] give ourselves the best chance we can possibly have when we get to playoff time.”
There’s some required adaptability involved along the way, including not hunkering down and being “stubborn” in games, like Bednar said his squad was in Wednesday’s loss.
“We’re not there yet. Fortunately, we’ve put together some good stretches of hockey that have gotten us back into it a little bit. The goal is still just to make it,” Devon Toews said of the get-in-and-then-win mentality of the team. “There’s still a lot of good teams and we got hard games coming up, and a lot of the other teams have hard games as well. So we just got to make sure we keep winning.”
