No. 272: NATHAN MacKINNON I / On a given night he's the most dynamic player in the game. I first talked to him at 14. Eighteen months later, I didn't recognize him.
Sometimes, not all the times, you recognize the Next Big Thing when you see it. With Sid, I did. With Nate, honestly, I didn't. Wasn't until I saw him a second time that it registered.
I watched Colorado come back to beat the Leafs Saturday night, as Toronto fans had to suspect the Avalanche were going to do.
Anyone who thought otherwise was watching the game through glasses purchased at a Scotiabank Arena merch booth. Through a good chunk of the game the Leafs had outscored the home team, but Colorado had soundly, soundly outplayed them, ringing up shots at better than a 2:1 ratio, your lowliest data, thoroughly unadvanced analytics, but still tell. That the game finished with two empty-net goals would lead you to believe that the contest was closer than the 7-4 score would suggest, but in fact the opposite was true.
Nathan with the game-winner Saturday night. I had seen the before. In a driveway.
Nathan with the century.
Going back to last month I also watched the Four Nations tournament with interest as Canadians were want to do. I watched the final overtime thriller, Canada beating the U.S., a second time. And a third. I have the final saved on my PVR for when my daughter visits this summer, so we can watch McDavid win it after Matthews had his chances.
I don’t know if I’ll watch that game as many times as Gimme Shelter, which I watched for the first time back in high-school days at a Friday midnight screening at an art-house rep theatre and went to showings of the film every Friday night for a couple of years. Yeah, Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ documentary about the Rolling Stones and Altamont, which was not surprisingly the first DVD I owned and the one that gets dropped in and played at least a couple of tunes a year, the Criterion Collection’s commentary requiring a second full viewing each and every time, and then on to the other extras.
Gimme Shelter. If you haven’t watched it, seek it out. A matter for another SubStack post, mind you. Back to our regular programming.
In both that game Saturday night and the Four Nations tournament, my attentions landed on Nathan MacKinnon, as just about everyone’s attentions do in just about any game that he plays in. In a lot of NHL games and in particular the Four Nations tournament, line-ups feature players I’ve talked to and written about on their way up (and, let’s face it, on my way out). I first talked to him in December 2009. Sat down with him when he was home from school on Christmas vacation. If you’re doing the math, he was 14. And if you’re doing the higher math, that’s more than half his lifetime ago.
Nate, 14, in the family driveway for ESPN The Magazine.
Chez MacKinnon in Cole Harbour, me on the left.
This was a moment with the photographer when I went to Cole Harbour to talk to Nate for an ESPN The Magazine piece.
True story. While I talked to Nate’s parents, he ducked out with the photographer to pose for shots, one taking shots on a net in the driveway, the other donning skates and playing shinny on the frozen pond in back of their home. With the latter a moment that I hope the photographer caught: The ice wasn’t quite thick enough and Nate fell through it. No mortal risk—the icy water was only knee deep.
“Don’t tell my parents,” he told us. “They’ll give me heck.”
That this remained just a comic moment turned out to be a very good thing for the Shattuck-St Mary’s, the Minnesota school he was attending, the Halifax Mooseheads whom he’d later lead to the Memorial Cup, the Colorado Avalanche whom he’d lead to a Stanley Cup and maybe another or more, and the Canadian team at the Four Nations. Were it not for a pandemic, he’d have played for Canada in the last Olympics, and barring another or some sort of other catastrophe, he’ll be in the next one. I’d have him carrying the flag.
Everyone by now knows that Nate and Sidney Crosby come out of the same neighbourhood, Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. And we’ve seen them pair up in commercials—somehow Sid seemed perpetually anti-fun until Nate came along. That Nate took on one-shots on the Trailer Park Boys and Mr D kinda thawed out Sid, whose lighter side was previously shielded from the public.
True story.
Of course Sid came up in talking to Nate back in ‘09. We were watching the naming of the Canadian team’s roster for the Vancouver Olympics.
“Do you ever talk to Sid?” I said. “Get advice from him?”
Seemed a reasonable ask.
“I saw him when he won the Cup last summer and I’ve watched him skate at the arena and stuff, but I never met him or talked to him,” Nate said. “I did read the book about him though.”
There were a couple of biographies about No, 87 and mine was the first—to my mind the best researched if not the best written.
“Is it the one I wrote?” I asked.
Nate didn’t know, didn’t catch the author’s name seeing as it was in smaller type on the cover. He went to his room and fetched it. I pulled out my pen and prepared to sign it, but when he showed it to me I could see there was no point. No need, as you will realize when you read the lead of my second draft of the story I filed.
Have a look. Tomorrow I’ll revisit young Nathan 18 months later when I didn’t recognize him.
To ESPN The Magazine, February 2, 2010
Nathan MacKinnon is like a lot of hockey-playing 14-year-olds. He has posters of Sidney Crosby on his bedroom walls. He watches Crosby on the tube every chance he had. He has read and re-read a biography of Sidney Crosby until the pages were dog-eared. He only stopped reading the book after the MacKinnons’ Labrador Retriever gnawed the hardcover off it.
Like some other lucky kids, Nathan has seen Crosby play in person a couple of times and even got his autograph. The magazine Crosby signed is under glass and on display on the kitchen counter.
Sidney Crosby is the player Nathan MacKinnon grew up idolizing. He’s also the player Nathan MacKinnon grew up around the corner from in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia.
Nathan MacKinnon didn’t set out to be Just Like Sid. He didn’t fire pucks into a dryer in the basement the way Crosby had. No, in his basement Nathan fired thousands of shots at a beaten-up net with plastic milk jugs hanging off the crossbar for top-shelf targets. He still drags the relic into the driveway when he find a friend who’s willing to go in goal.
Still, there’s no getting away from it.
They played at the same rinks, in the same leagues, same tournaments. They played ball hockey on the same empty tennis courts in freezing rain and sleet and gale-force wind that aren’t among the charms of the suburb across the bridge from downtown Halifax. They even played on the same frozen ponds when there was nothing else available.
When Nathan would go to games and practices at Cole Harbour Place he had to walk by the ever-growing and burglar-alarmed display case full of Crosby memorabilia: sticks, sweaters, pucks, photos and newspaper clippings.
Nathan would be just like most other 14-year-old kids you’d meet in Cole Harbour except that he’s managed to do pretty much the same thing Sidney Crosby did before his voice broke. Nathan scored goals by the hundreds in the same leagues that Crosby did. Just like Crosby, Nathan played “up” in the top local leagues, on the ice with and against players two and three years older than him, some a foot taller than him. And just like Crosby, Nathan ran out of challenges in Cole Harbour, had to leave home to find a game and head off to Shattuck-St Mary’s, the private school and hockey powerhouse in Faribault, Minnesota.
Nathan would rather be MacKinnon 1.0 rather than Crosby 2.0. It’s hard enough to be 14, never mind being compared to the youngest-ever captain of a Stanley Cup winner.
“My first couple of months at Shattuck I was meeting kids every day and it always came up,” he says. “When they’d ask where I was from and I told them, they’d say ‘Is that where Crosby is from?’”
Shattuck-St Mary’s coaches first spotted Nathan when he was playing for a Nova Scotia select team in a tournament two years ago and they talked to his father Graham and mother Kathy about having their son enroll at the school the next fall. Nathan and his father visited the campus and they knew it was the right spot, just the wrong time. “We just thought having Nathan go off at 13 was too soon,” Graham says.
Waiting a year has worked out just fine for Nathan. He wasn’t an instant sensation like Crosby was. “The first couple of months were a tough adjustment,” Shattuck’s bantam coach John LaFontaine says, “Nathan’s intense and emotional and he shows it. Sometimes, reading his body language, it looked like he was about himself rather than team. He was dwelling on mistakes, really hard on himself. For two months I don’t know if he had a team-mate who wanted to play with him. But he turned the corner and got it. Now all of them love playing with.”
Nathan also had some adversity not of his own making. Nathan arrived safely back on campus after the Christmas holidays but his equipment didn’t. Several days passed while the airlines tried to track his baggage. Nathan had to head off with the Shattuck bantams to a weekend tournament in Michigan with borrowed equipment but his parents were flying in and bringing his back-up skates—and they got lost in transit too. “We’d have taken them in carry-on but you can’t with the blades,” his mother Kathy says.
Despite a rocky start and Nathan has led the bantam team in scoring all year, a goal-and-a-half a game. He’s unofficially leading all students in free time spent on the ice. “Every chance I get I’ll go over to the rink to work out,” he says. “At home we’d only get to practice two or maybe three times a week. At Shattuck we’re practicing or playing every days and the arena is always open—you can get an extra skate in mornings and lunches.”
“If we let him he’d never leave the rink,” LaFontaine says.
Nathan’s not sure about his long-term goals—he hasn’t decided if he wants to play NCAA hockey or eventually head to the Quebec major junior league. He’s sure about his plans for next season.
“I want to make the prep team at 15,” Nathan says. “Sidney did it but only a few others have. Even guys like Zach Parise who are stars in the NHL didn’t make the prep as 15-year-olds.”
LaFontaine says Nathan’s “in the mix” to make Shattuck’s top team next year. And if he does, he’ll be hearing all about Crosby again. Nathan says he’ll have no problem with it.
“What Sidney did when he went from Cole Harbour to Shattuck made it seem possible for me,” Nathan says.
Nathan is a little tired of questions about his hometown. Still, he wouldn’t mind if the next talented Cole Harbour kid who enrolls at Shattuck is asked a thousand times: “Cole Harbour … is that where Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon are from?”
Worth noting: Nathan MacKinnon didn’t make the varsity team at Shattuck that following season. You know who had made that jump as a sophomore besides Sidney Crosby? If you guessed Jonathan Toews, sorry. It was in fact Angelo Esposito—if you read my entry about Angelo you’d know his father probably has a contract out on me.
Check out No. 216: ANGELO ESPOSITO / He was projected to go No. 1 & light up the NHL. Then his star crashed. Some come away from teen hockey glory entitled, others traumatized, embittered. (You’ll need at least a trial paid subscription to get behind the paywall.
Oh, and of interest only for sports-journalism students or MacKinnon obsessives: I wrote a very different version of the story above for the Mag. You’ll find the first draft below the paywall, which will give you an idea of the shifting drafts you’ll encounter if you make the mistake of pursuing this dodge as your life’s work.
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