One particularly revealing answer from Nathan MacKinnon on media day was technically about the long offseason, and his excitement for the coming season with the Avalanche.
The interesting part was really a diagnosis of last season, and a look at the evolution of a franchise firmly within a window to compete for championships.
“I just don’t think we had the team to win last year,” MacKinnon said. “When you’re in it, you always believe. But yeah, (the longer offseason) has been great. I think we’re very motivated. It just felt like we never really had it last year all season. I know we won the division, but it took some teams falling off and we got really hot, but it just didn’t feel like we really had it. I think we’re all very motivated this year to get our standards back to where we need to be to win. You have to be pretty near perfect to get the job done.”
It feels like a rare thing to hear one of the best players in the world say his defending Stanley Cup champions “didn’t have it.” Maybe that’s obvious in hindsight — the Avs won more playoff rounds in 2022 than postseason games last year.
But the 2022-23 edition of Colorado’s hockey club was still a really good team. The Avs finished with 109 points, two fewer than the eventual Stanley Cup champs, and with a better goal differential than the Vegas Golden Knights.
Most organizations would love to finish with that many points, and to enter the postseason on a 16-2-1 heater. The defending champs looked a lot like a team primed for another go at it for the final month of the season.
“We were just so hurt the whole year,” MacKinnon said later in camp when asked about his media day comments. “Every day it just felt like momentum was getting taken away from us and it was just frustrating. We had good players going down almost every day, including myself — I missed 11 games. Mikko (Rantanen) stayed healthy, which was awesome and the only reason we got to where we did, so it was just frustrating.
“We did what we could. We gave it our all and we still lost.”
Cale Makar missed 22 games during the regular season. Valeri Nichushkin missed nearly 30. Josh Manson missed two-thirds of the season, while Gabriel Landeskog never got healthy enough to play at all.
The injury issues came to a breaking point in the postseason. Makar was still bothered by various injuries. Andrew Cogliano suffered a broken neck during the Seattle series. Nichushkin’s stunning departure, which the team still refers to as personal reasons, left a team that was already thin stretched beyond its means.
“When you win, you know what it takes and how good you have to be,” Cogliano said. “I just felt like we were chasing all year. I think that’s what (MacKinnon) meant. We were just chasing and chasing in terms of injuries and the lineup. It just felt like it was an uphill battle.
“It was a tough year. That’s probably one of the toughest years I’ve ever been a part of. We had one of the best teams in the league, but the amount of stuff we had to fight through … I’m not making excuses. It was just the truth.”
Despite all of the issues, the Avs still certainly could have won the series against the Kraken. Would they have had enough juice to win another three rounds? Probably not. And that was part of MacKinnon’s point.
When he said the Avalanche “didn’t have it,” it wasn’t that some fatal flaw had been revealed. There wasn’t an exposed thermal exhaust port.
The entire season had been more of a grind than the one before. It wore on everyone.
“I think it was just harder,” Avs defenseman Devon Toews said. “I think we felt like we had a chance to do it. Your goal is obviously to push hard and strive for it again, but unfortunately we couldn’t. I think it was just more of a struggle than the year before. Things were a little more difficult, a little more adversity. Games were a bit more of a challenge. There were nights where it was harder to get to our game.
“Tired bodies, tired legs. It’s hard when you have all those injuries. You’re taxing guys more than you want to earlier in the season. It just kind of all accumulates and adds up. It’s probably a combination of a lot of things.”
This sort of self-diagnosis, from a team that was still very successful relative to much of the NHL, is a window into the standards MacKinnon mentioned. And in some ways, the torrid finish to the regular season and the way Colorado battled despite being shorthanded against Seattle, was a reminder of the championship DNA that’s still here.
“Whatever was going through our heads, I think our actions spoke for themselves,” Cogliano said. “We came back and won the Central (Division). I think that just proves what we have here in terms of how strong mentally we are.
“I think our culture, what we do here, our professionalism speaks for itself, the coaching, no matter who was in the lineup — to win the Central, no one cares about that now, but it was a real feather in our cap at the time. We lost to a good team in seven (games), but a couple bounces here and there could have won the series and who knows what happens?”
There was one area where Seattle had an advantage: its depth, particularly at forward. The Kraken couldn’t match Colorado’s star power, but they won the war of attrition.
That’s one area that was also addressed during the offseason, and a reason to believe MacKinnon and Co. when they believe another run at a championship is not just possible, but expected.
“Obviously we can be better, but I don’t think there’s one area where we need to fix it,” MacKinnon said. “Just with the players that we brought in, all these guys are super competitive. If anything, I don’t think we had enough compete throughout our lineup. Guys with a little more bite. I know that’s kind of a cliche thing, but it does matter — especially in the playoffs.”
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