Few superstar athletes are as pragmatic, honest and insightful as Nathan MacKinnon, particularly at his team’s toughest moments.
Few moments in recent seasons have been tougher than the shocking end to Game 7 in Dallas last year. MacKinnon and the Colorado Avalanche were 13 minutes from the second round with a two-goal lead before ex-teammate Mikko Rantanen had three goals and an assist to give the Dallas Stars a 4-2 win and the series.
In a stunned locker room, MacKinnon said it best: “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
He was referring in part to how well the Avs had played, how the Stars had two critical players injured for most of the series and still, this core group’s quest for a second championship came up painfully short.
“Now that you ask me about it, I still think about it,” Avs forward Parker Kelly said. “It’s something you’re not going to forget. It’s definitely tough the whole summer, then once you get back to training camp, it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s a new year, new season. We’ve learned from it, and we’re going to try and use it as motivation.’
“You never totally get over it.”
It was a crossroads moment for the players, for the organization. Three straight years, Colorado fell well short of postseason expectations. This one, because of how it ended — and who the main antagonist was — felt a little different. Every NHL team that makes the Stanley Cup Playoffs but doesn’t win the title has a collective empty feeling at the end.
This was a different level of pain.
“Yeah, I probably felt sick to my stomach, physically, for a week or two,” Avs forward Jack Drury said. “Like, awful. Then, the rest of the summer, it sticks to you a little bit. You just try to grow from it. I think your whole life, any losses stick from when you’re 14-years-old on.
“I’ve heard Nate say it before, like you can use those things sometimes to make your team tighter and grow from it, and hopefully we can keep using it going forward.”
Colorado’s management group set the course for this 2025-26 team almost immediately after the Game 7 loss. President Joe Sakic joined general manager Chris MacFarland for the end-of-season press conference. Sakic’s appearance was rare and surprising, but the message was clear.
Sakic and MacFarland believed in this group, and felt they had a roster capable of winning the Stanley Cup. There would be no massive upheaval. This group would get another crack at it.
The Avs retained key trade addition Brock Nelson before he even had a chance to hit the open market. They signed Brent Burns to a one-year deal. Twenty players appeared in at least five games against Dallas, and 17 of them returned for training camp.
“I think that one, even still thinking about it, stings in a way,” Logan O’Connor said. “We felt as though we had a team that had an opportunity to go on a pretty good run. We came up short of the goal in a Game 7 in a series we felt could have gone either way. For me personally, you really think about it for a couple weeks, but then it honestly lingers until the next season starts.
“I think losing that way with the group, and we had a very similar group coming back this year, it just bonds a group together, failing in that way, as hard it was. You use it as motivation through this run, knowing that these opportunities don’t come around every year. Have the team management has assembled, it’s on us to go do the job now.”
Multiple players pointed to MacKinnon as the guy who has helped put that stunning Game 7 loss into the best perspective.
“It definitely stung,” Avs captain Gabe Landeskog. “Hard to put a time limit on it. Whenever you lose in the playoffs and they’re still going on, it’s always a little bitter. For at least one round, I just have zero interest in it. You’re just pissed off.
“Nate has said it numerous times, about losing can bring the group closer together and actually can be a good thing for your group if you take it the right way. I think it meant a lot. It was something like, you don’t come into training camp ruminating over something that happened four months ago, but you definitely keep it with you, for sure.”
The Avs certainly arrived in training camp as a focused, re-committed group. Colorado reeled off a 31-2-7 start to the season, which allowed the Avs to be the NHL’s pacesetter.
Even with some injuries and a bit of a lull in the dog days, no one caught them. Winning the Central Division and earning the top seed in the Western Conference — something this group zeroed in on in large part because of that painful night in North Texas — has already paid clear dividends.
Now, the Avs face the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Final. There’s a parallel to be drawn here.
Colorado’s six-game defeat by Vegas during the 2021 playoffs — after the Avs won the first two games, right when this group thought it was about to arrive — left a similar bitter taste in their mouths. That series loss hurt. It lingered.
It provided some added motivation the following year, when Colorado stormed to the Stanley Cup. Now, this group is four wins away from the Cup Final, again.
“No question, it (had affect on this season),” Avs coach Jared Bednar said of Game 7 in Dallas. “I had the same feeling in 2021. The disappointment and the heartbreak kind of sets you for the next season. There’s a lot of similarities with the way we came into camp, the focus of the group, the consistency we played with all year. We knew there were some important milestones that could help us come playoff time. No guarantee, but I think we did a good job of focusing on those short-term goals and some longer-term goals from the regular season that has helped us through the playoffs.
“The messaging was the same. Everything that we were going to do was going to be in preparation for the playoffs. It’s always like that, but I think the buy-in from our guys both in 2022 and this year — it’s at a different level, because they know what the stakes are.”
