Nathan MacKinnon has spent most of his life living in the shadow of one of the best hockey players of all time.

When he was younger, the obvious comparison was Sidney Crosby. MacKinnon grew up in the same town, and Crosby was one of his idols. The stories about MacKinnon’s rise to amateur hockey stardom are as mythical in Nova Scotia as Crosby’s.

There’s the one about how he would challenge coaches, not teammates, to shooting competitions at 11 years old. Then there was the day when Hockey Canada didn’t invite a 16-year-old MacKinnon to its world junior championships tryout camp. He responded the next game by scoring five goals in five different ways against Quebec, with coach Patrick Roy watching from behind the Ramparts bench.

“The way I try to describe him is to tell anybody who has coached youth sports to take the best athlete they’ve ever seen at a certain age and then you combine that with the fiercest competitor you’ve ever met at any age. That’s what you got there with Nate,” said Jon Greenwood, a fellow Cole Harbour native who coached MacKinnon in his youth.

“He’s obviously gifted and blessed with some amazing athleticism, but the drive is really what separates him.”

MacKinnon has carved his own path to hockey stardom. He’s now universally considered one of the best players in the world and will go down as one of the best players of his generation.

But there is also a new shadow, at least when it comes to outsiders and pundits and their penchant for rankings.

Connor McDavid is the near-consensus choice as the best player in the world. MacKinnon had his best statistical campaign in 2022-23, but McDavid had the best season anyone has seen in almost three decades and is the reigning league MVP.

The 2023-24 season will be MacKinnon’s 11th in the NHL. He just turned 28 years old, which likely puts him at about the midpoint of his career.

His team is firmly in the middle of a Stanley Cup-or-bust window. The next few seasons will play a large role in determining MacKinnon’s overall legacy as a player. He can be one of the best players of all time, but just how far up those very subjective lists can he climb?

“I think Nathan MacKinnon is a Hall of Famer, already,” TSN analyst and former NHL GM Craig Button said. “At the same time, when it’s all said and done, what he does as he goes through the next several years, the team success as much as the individual success will determine what level of stature he has when he is done playing.”

Individual performance

Any debate about players in any sport is always subjective, but statistics are also always going to matter. Through the first 10 seasons of his career, MacKinnon has accumulated 248 goals and 759 points in 709 games.

A typical NHL aging curve says players will not produce as well in the second half of their careers. Given that, an initial thought is that 500 goals and 1,500 points could be a stretch.

There are a couple of reasons why it might not be for MacKinnon. One is that some of the best players in the world are able to outperform projections based on an aging curve.

Crosby is a good example of this. He collected 853 points in his first 10 seasons. Even with the COVID-19 pandemic stealing some games, there’s a strong chance he’ll score 800-plus in his second 10 years.

The second reason is a recent increase in scoring around the league. More goals for every team means a better chance for a player like MacKinnon to continue scoring at the same clip.

MacKinnon scored more goals and points per game in 2022-23 than he had in any season. His points per game in the past four years are the four highest marks of his career.

There are currently 15 players in NHL history with 1,500 or more career points. Alex Ovechkin needs 15 more to make it 16. McDavid is certainly on track to reach that milestone, but the only other active player who might get there before MacKinnon is Leon Draisaitl.

MacKinnon could be the 18th or 19th player to reach it, particularly if he decides to play beyond 10 more seasons. Even if he “only” gets to 1,400, there could be as few as 25 or 26 players in that club once he does.

That is exclusive company, regardless of how difficult it can be to compare players across eras in this sport.

Individual awards

This could be the trickiest part of assessing MacKinnon’s legacy. He won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year, and he’s been named a second-team postseason All-Star twice.

He has not won the Hart Trophy nor the Ted Lindsay Award, which are both league MVP honors. He has finished second in the Hart voting twice, in 2018 and 2020, and was third in 2021.

“Not important,” MacKinnon said when asked about winning a Hart Trophy. “The individual stuff is left up to other people. I can’t control if they vote for me. I mean, I’ve been there before, close to winning and it’s up to writers so I just try to put that as separate from myself because I can’t control who they vote for.”

It’s far more rare to find a world-class hockey player who doesn’t value team success over individual accolades, but MacKinnon’s drive and work ethic are at an extreme level, even compared to other greats.

Anyone who knows him well knew what his answer to MVP-related questions was going to be.

“That is the way he’s wired. Nathan is wired to win,” Button said. “He’s wired to be the best he can be. If you ask Nathan after he scores three goals and gets six points but his team loses, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter. That’s what makes him so special.”

McDavid has won the Hart in three of the past six seasons. Given the season he just had, with 64 goals and 153 points at 26 years old, it’s certainly plausible that the Oilers star is about to rip off a run of three or four in a row.

Auston Matthews, who is one of the players who will jostle with MacKinnon to be considered the second-best center of this generation, won the Hart in 2022 when he led the league with 60 goals. Draisaitl, the fourth member of this “Big Four” discussion at the position, won the Hart in 2020 when he led the league with 110 points.

The other most-often named player on most top-five lists is Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar, which is another wrinkle in any discussion about MacKinnon’s ability to take home individual hardware.

Makar, not MacKinnon, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as MVP of the playoffs after the Avs captured the Stanley Cup in 2022. He is also going to be a potential Hart candidate in any season where both guys stay healthy and produce at an all-world level.

“That’s why you have to put everything into context,” Button said. “Nathan is one of the five best players on the planet. There’s no question. What I find fascinating is that, in my view, four of the top five players on the planet right now … two of them play in Colorado and two are in Edmonton.

“If you ask Cale, I’m sure he’d say, ‘You know what, I do probably take some votes away from Nathan,’ and Nathan would probably say, ‘Yeah, I take some votes away from Cale.’ It happens, for sure.”

Team Success

This is where MacKinnon has the most direct path to a place among the all-time greats.

One name came up, both from Button and Avs coach Jared Bednar, when discussing MacKinnon’s impact on the franchise and the sport at large — Red Wings legend Steve Yzerman.

Earlier in training camp, Bednar discussed MacKinnon’s evolution as a player. He referenced Yzerman, whose transformation from offensive wizard to all-around, two-way dominance is often credited as a reason why Detroit became one of the league’s signature franchises in the late 1990s and 2000s.

“The year we won and the year before we won, if you look at Nate’s job throughout the playoffs, it was more like the way guys talk about Stevie Yzerman,” Bednar said. “It wasn’t about being the leading scorer. It was about making sure that our team won. He was willing to sacrifice whatever he had to sacrifice personally in order for our team to win. It wasn’t about him getting the most points or winning the Conn Smythe. It was about us winning.

“That’s what I love about him. … That’s why we won.”

Button referenced Yzerman from a historical context.

“Steve Yzerman is one of the greatest players to ever play the game,” Button said. “Go back and look at how many first- and second-team end-of-season All-Star teams he was on. He was up against Wayne (Gretzky) and Mario (Lemieux). I mean, good luck.”

Yzerman, who finished his career with 1,755 points and is considered one of the 15-20 best players of all time, made one postseason All-Star team, in 2000 when he was 34 years old. He never won the Hart, though he did win the players’ MVP and a Selke Trophy as the best defensive forward.

For a generation of players who came just before MacKinnon, Yzerman and Avs legend Joe Sakic were idols because of their two-way dominance and team success.

Yzerman won the Stanley Cup three times. Crosby has won the Cup three times. That’s the biggest measuring stick for MacKinnon.

“It’s more about team success and winning. He’s always been that way,” Greenwood said. “The main goal, and the biggest part of building a legacy, is winning Cups. I think he just wants to do whatever he can to get his name on the Cup as many times as possible. He’s not the only player in the league who feels this way, but I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy with a year where he wins a Hart Trophy but loses in the first round of the playoffs. I don’t think that would be very satisfying for him at all.”

“I’ve only got one”

MacKinnon’s name is on the Cup once. The Avs are among the preseason favorites again this season, with a retooled roster and a core group that is hungry to put the sour taste of a frustrating title defense behind them.

As long as MacKinnon and Makar are together in Colorado, the Avalanche can be a good team. Assuming the Avs can find a way to keep Devon Toews and Mikko Rantanen beyond the next two seasons, they can be a great team for years to come.

Those shadows, both from the legend at home and the one in the making in Alberta, are not likely to go anywhere anytime soon. MacKinnon’s best chance to carve out his own legendary legacy is to simply keep winning.

“I heard him in some interviews after they won, but also just talking to people who knew him personally that summer, it was like, ‘OK, Nate, you finally achieved this huge goal. … Can you relax a little bit now?’ Or, ‘Are you satisfied?’” Greenwood said. “And his answer was always, ‘Well, I’ve only got one.’

“For a guy who kind of lived in Sid’s shadow to finally get his Cup in year nine, you’d think he’d finally be able to breathe a little. I think he has to a certain extent, but the thing that Avs fans should be most excited about is that he’ll never be satisfied. I think he sees what he hasn’t accomplished yet, so he’ll keep changing his goals and he still has more goals to achieve.”

Center stage

While it’s difficult to compare players between eras, one thing that is for certain through the first 10 seasons of Nathan MacKinnon’s NHL career: If the Avalanche center can continue to produce at the same rate, he’ll find himself among the top 12 centers in league history in terms of point production.

Hitting the peak?

Does Nathan MacKinnon have another gear in him? He was among the most productive centers in the modern era of the NHL in terms of points per game from ages 24-27. Here’s a look:

* Has only played age 24-26 seasons.

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