Colorado Avalanche Evaluation and Areas for Improvement: Nathan MacKinnon

While Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon had a career year, until you win the Stanley Cup, there’s always room for improvement.

Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon had a career season. Not only did he lead the team in scoring, he topped his previous points total by a mile — his 97 points were a full 34 points than his previous best, earned his rookie season.

In all that, MacKinnon was pretty consistently in Hart Trophy discussions from late November on, and he was a finalist. Though the trophy ultimately went to Taylor Hall, most fans and fellow players saw MacKinnon as the favorite to the very end.

Seems like a pretty cut-and-dry evaluation, right? Also easy advice for next season — keep on keeping on.

Well, it’s not as simple as that. Let’s look at a little more in-depth analysis of MacKinnon’s season.

Evaluation of Nathan MacKinnon’s 2017-18 Season

Goals: 39
Assists: 58
Shots: 284
Shooting percentage: 13.7%
Faceoff percentage: 41.92%
CF%: 50.9%
CF% Rel: 4.9

As noted above, MacKinnon had a career season. He recorded his third-ever 20+-goal season and first-ever 30+-goal season. As you can see, he was one goal shy of a 40-goal season. His 58 assists were also a career best.

I’d like to delve a little deeper into MacKinnon’s scoring trends. Mostly, I’d like to point out he started out slow — 3 goals and 5 assists in all of October. His pace started picking up in November — 5 goals and 15 assists.

December and January were both consistently good months for MacKinnon. He earned 8 goals, 10 assists in December and 8 goals, 7 assists in January.

MacKinnon suffered a shoulder injury in late January against the Vancouver Canucks and missed eight games in February. In the six games he played when he returned, he earned 5 goals, 5 assists.

Nathan MacKinnon’s totals were impressive for March — 9 goals, 13 assists. However, those totals belie the fact that MacKinnon slowed down March 20, going nine games without a goal and only six assists in that time. That led to April’s regular season total of 1 goal, 3 assists.

MacKinnon has never been afraid to shoot the puck. Indeed, he led all Avs players in that category. This season, he coupled that with his career-best shooting percentage — 13.7%, which we naturally saw in his goals total.

MacKinnon’s CorsiFor and Relative Corsi show, not surprisingly, that the team is better when he’s on the ice. The other important stat is the faceoff win percentage, which was a very unimpressive 41.92%.

Areas of Improvement for Nathan MacKinnon

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I think the most obvious area for improvement for Nathan MacKinnon is that last one — faceoff wins. You can talk all you want about how that’s not an overly important statistic. However, faceoffs help drive possession, and I thought we all agreed possession is an important aspect of winning hockey games.

It’s an especially important quality in your number-one center. To give you a hint, MacKinnon’s buddy, Sidney Crosby, earned a 53.02 faceoff win percentage last season and is 51.5% all-time.

It’s hard to say you want MacKinnon to work on consistency. He was pretty consistent throughout most of the season, recording between 15 to 22 points each month for most of the season. The outliers were the beginning and end of his season.

The slow start doesn’t worry me — you see that a lot even in great players like former Avalanche Jarome Iginla. However, his petering out near the end of the season, just when the Avs were making a playoff push, that’s what worries me.

You could make a case that MacKinnon was tired after carrying the team for the whole season. That’s valid. However, you want your big players to steal games when it counts the most. To be honest, that may be what lost MacKinnon the Hart — Hall simply played big when he had to. And he did so without the support MacKinnon had.

Guess what: Hall is in his prime at 26 years old. MacKinnon is just 22. If we’re lucky — and we all hope we are — Nate is just striding into his prime. We all hope he doesn’t have a regression season. We all hope the real Nathan MacKinnon stood up — and it’s the player in god mode we saw last year.

Next: Plan for Getting MacKinnon a Cup

Nathan MacKinnon played a fantastic season for the Colorado Avalanche. But we need more. We need him to crack that 40-goal mark. We need him to crack that 100-point mark. We need him to keep elevating the players around him.

That’s the path to the team’s success.

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