This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Nathan MacKinnon

366 shots, second in the league, and more bursts over twenty miles an hour per game than anyone alive.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2013-14	COL	82	24	39	63	+20	26	8	0	5	241	10.0	17:21
2014-15	COL	64	14	24	38	-7	34	3	0	2	192	7.3	17:03
2015-16	COL	72	21	31	52	-4	20	7	0	6	245	8.6	18:52
2016-17	COL	82	16	37	53	-14	16	2	2	4	251	6.4	19:57
2017-18	COL	74	39	58	97	+11	55	12	0	12	284	13.7	19:54
2018-19	COL	82	41	58	99	+20	34	12	0	6	365	11.2	22:05
2019-20	COL	69	35	58	93	+13	12	12	0	4	318	11.0	21:13
2020-21	COL	48	20	45	65	+22	37	8	0	2	206	9.7	20:22
2021-22	COL	65	32	56	88	+22	42	7	0	5	299	10.7	21:04
2022-23	COL	71	42	69	111	+29	30	12	0	9	366	11.5	22:19
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	709	284	475	759	+112	306	83	2	55	2767	10.3	20:01

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

42 goals and 69 assists in 71 games — 111 points, fifth in the league — plus-29, 22:19 a night, and 366 shots on goal, second only to Pastrnak’s 407.

54.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 86th percentile. His ice went 81-51 against an expectation of 62.43-51.22: eighteen and a half goals more than the chances predicted at the offensive end, and almost exactly the expected number against.

Colorado’s finishing graded plus-4.0 for the season, thirteenth in the league. The two figures come from different models and cannot be subtracted, but the shape of it is hard to miss — the club’s surplus is not spread across four lines.

Ten seasons, 709 games, 759 points.

The Finesse Game

366 shots at a median of 33 feet, 24 per cent from inside twenty and 29 per cent from beyond forty. That is an unusually wide distribution for a scorer of this rank; most of them live in one place.

Beyond forty feet: 103 shots on goal, seven goals, 6.80 per cent — against a league rate of 4.16 per cent for a forward. Inside forty: 257 shots and 35 goals. He is dangerous from the blue line in a way almost no centre is, and it is not an accident of volume, because the rate holds up too.

He shoots more than he passes and still finished with 69 assists. The shot itself measures 93.3 mph, the 66th percentile — ordinary, and the reason the goals arrive is release and traffic rather than velocity.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 200, and the tracking numbers here are the most extreme in the feed. Top speed 24.0 mph, the 99th percentile. 3.48 miles a game, the 97th. And 7.69 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game — the highest figure in the National Hockey League, ahead of McDavid’s 6.50.

McDavid’s single fastest reading is marginally higher, 24.16 against 24.02. Neither of them is the fastest man in the league by that measure, which is Ryan Poehling at 24.32 and which is the clearest evidence available that a tracked maximum is not a ranking of skaters. Bursts per game is the number that survives, and MacKinnon leads it outright.

30 penalty minutes in 71 games. He plays hard through contact without generating any of it.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2013, a Calder, a Cup, and at 28 he has still never won a scoring title or a Hart.

111 points, 366 shots and the highest burst count in the league, in a season his club finished sixth in the West. The gap between what he does and what he is given credit for is the longest-running theme of his career, and the numbers here are the argument.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
29.2% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 92nd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
16:59 a game at five-on-five, 100th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
63% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“7.69 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game — the highest figure in the National Hockey League, ahead of McDavid's 6.50.”
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He is dangerous from the blue line in a way almost no centre is, and it is not an accident of volume, because the rate holds up too.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,206 minutes

Expected goals: 54.9%; 86th pct
Shot attempts: 55.7%; 92nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 81 for, 51 against. Expected: 62.4 and 51.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

99th

Numbers

86th

The two rank him within 13 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.

Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 85 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 71 games

Top speed: 24.0 mph; 99th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 7.69 a game
Distance: 3.48 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.3 mph; 85th pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 1206 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2022-23

The club: COL took 52.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.9% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,206 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mikko Rantanen	54.4%	56.1%	51.1%
Devon Toews	55.2%	54.5%	58.4%
Artturi Lehkonen	53.4%	56.5%	55.5%

54.4% together, 56.1% for him apart and 51.1% for Rantanen apart. Rantanen was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Rantanen than for him.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

480 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 44 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 24% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 29% from beyond forty.