Nathan MacKinnon

There’s no easy segue here. I’m just going to start writing about a completely unrelated player now, Nathan MacKinnon.

I originally did my research mid-week, with plans to simply update the numbers before my deadline. I knew full well that MacKinnon would probably light it up the day before, forcing me to either completely rewrite this piece, or risk looking like an idiot for pointing out the obvious. The same thing happened to me when I wrote an article the day before Claude Giroux snapped his own goalless streak last season. Indeed, there’s probably no better predictor of who will snap a cold streak than to check who I’m in the process of writing about.

In any event, the expectations for last year’s Calder trophy winner were all consistently between 72 and 77 points in every pre-season prediction publication that I could find, and yet MacKinnon had no goals, four assists, and is -6 in ten games going into Thursday’s 5-0 stomping of the Islanders. Is this another case of the sophomore slumps? I don’t think so.

MacKinnon is incredibly fast and skilled, and is actually playing very well. His 32 shots are second on the team to Matt Duchene, and his possession numbers are behind only his usual linemates, Ryan O’Reilly and Gabriel Landeskog.

So what went wrong? Thomas Drance of the Score seems to think his lack of scoring could be related to improper usage on the power play. I’ve heard others argue that he’s not getting up close, but a look at the Sporting Charts heat map reveals that his average shot distance is the same as always.

My theory? It’s just a shooting slump. Going into that research-ruining game, he had scored on precisely two of his last 100 shots over the past 34 regular season games. That was destined not to last! Enforcers like Paul Bissonnette score on seven percent of their shots, and there’s an old, half-blind guy in my beer league who finds twine on at least five percent of his, thanks to random chance.

Remember, last year MacKinnon scored just two goals in 45 shots in his first 17 games, or three goals in 66 shots in his first 23. It happens. Make an offer, and try to pick him up while there’s a chance a fantasy owner thinks he’s Jonathan Huberdeau or Nail Yakupov instead of a future Art Ross contender.

Closing Thoughts

Player go through slumps, but the most noticeable ones occur at the start of the season when everyone is putting their numbers on top of a blank sheet. That’s why a lot of fans overreact to the initial ups and downs of even the league’s best players.

That’s also why it’s helpful to use hockey analytics to look at the underlying numbers to see if there’s anything amiss, or something that might have been overlooked in previous seasons. If that’s clearly not the case, like with Tuukka Rask and Nathan MacKinnon, place your confidence in the mountains of analysis conducted on the previous several years, instead of unfortunate 10-game stretches. If you don’t have them on your team, make an offer, and if you do, don’t become "that guy" who traded away a franchise player in October.