This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Nathan MacKinnon

The reigning Hart winner put up 116 points and drove a 58.3 per cent chance share, the highest figure on any first line in hockey.

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	COL	82	51	89	140	+35	42	10	0	9	405	12.6	22:49
2024-25	COL	79	32	84	116	+25	41	9	0	5	320	10.0	22:47
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	870	367	648	1015	+172	389	102	2	69	3492	10.5	20:32

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

32 goals and 84 assists in 79 games for 116 points, plus-25, on 22:47 a night and 320 shots — 2nd in the league in scoring and a career high in assists.

The number that matters more is 58.3 per cent. That is his share of the expected goals with the puck at five-on-five, the 98th percentile among every skater in the league, and it did not move when Mikko Rantanen was traded in January. He carried whoever was put beside him.

The Finesse Game

The fastest hard skater in hockey. Speed carrying weight is the rare combination — most men who move like this are 180 pounds and get removed from pucks, and he is 200 and does not. The stride lets him enter the zone at pace while still protecting the puck, so defencemen back off, and the moment they back off he has the blue line.

What has changed over the last three years is that he no longer has to. The one-timer is now a genuine weapon rather than a thing he occasionally tries, and the playmaking has grown every season — 84 assists is a man who has learned to slow down and find the late arrival rather than force the rush he could always win. His median shot comes from 28 feet with 28 per cent of them inside 20, which for a player with this much speed says he is getting to the interior and not settling for the outside.

The Physical Game

6 feet and 200 pounds, and he plays heavier than that because of how fast he arrives. He is not a fighter and does not run people, but he is very difficult to knock off a puck and he finishes his checks on the forecheck when the play calls for it.

41 penalty minutes is the mark of a man who competes at the edge rather than one who loses his head. The body has held up: 79 games, and he has missed real time only once in a decade.

The Intangibles

The engine of the franchise and, at 30, still adding to his game rather than defending it. When the club traded its second-best forward in January and got back a winger who had never scored 60 points, MacKinnon’s own production went up.

The honest question about him is the one nobody wants to ask a player this good: he has one Cup, and the two postseasons since have ended in the second round and the first. There is no evidence in the numbers that he shrinks — he does not — but a career is judged on Aprils, and he is now into the years where they start to run out.

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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
59.0% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 48.9% for his club in the minutes he sat: +10.1, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
17:06 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
65% 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
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“The stride lets him enter the zone at pace while still protecting the puck, so defencemen back off, and the moment they back off he has the blue line.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“84 assists is a man who has learned to slow down and find the late arrival rather than force the rush he could always win”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“he is very difficult to knock off a puck”
punishingpresent and ordinary· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is not a fighter and does not run people, but he is very difficult to knock off a puck and he finishes his checks on the forecheck when the play calls for it.”
nastypresent and ordinary· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“41 penalty minutes is the mark of a man who competes at the edge rather than one who loses his head.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,351 minutes

Expected goals: 59%; 98th pct
Shot attempts: 58.7%; 97th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 69 for, 48 against. Expected: 76.8 and 53.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

100th

Numbers

98th

The two rank him within 2 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 91 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, 2024-25 · 79 games

Top speed: 23.8 mph; 98th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 6.92 a game
Distance: 3.69 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.9 mph; 66th 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

2024-25 · 1351 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, 2024-25

The club: COL took 53.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 59.0% — 5.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,351 minutes at five-on-five — 94th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Cale Makar	62.5%	51.3%	45.8%
Devon Toews	60.1%	57.4%	48.3%
Artturi Lehkonen	59.5%	58.4%	49.7%

62.5% together, 51.3% for him apart and 45.8% for Makar apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

428 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 31 of them goals. His median goal came from 24 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.