Nathan MacKinnon has scanned the names of players on the Stanley Cup and gotten that overwhelming feeling of satisfaction that he too is joining them after helping the Colorado Avalanche win it last season.
“It’s all the best players ever are on it,” MacKinnon said on this week’s episode of the “NHL @TheRink” podcast. “It’s pretty cool to be part of that. I think we’re on that for 60 years and we’re in the Hall of Fame after, so I’ll be dead before then. I’ll be on there for the rest of my life. Pretty cool.”
MacKinnon joined co-hosts Dan Rosen and Shawn P. Roarke to discuss winning the Stanley Cup last season, the impact it has had on his life, his parade through Halifax, Nova Scotia in the offseason and much more.
He also talked about how the Avalanche are now the hunted because they are the defending champions, a new challenge for a team that in the previous three seasons could not make it out of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“We can’t really worry about that,” MacKinnon said. “In my opinion, I think why we were so good is because we were just worried about ourselves and how we played and how we performed, that we were going to dictate the pace and dictate how the games go with our strengths. We can” t control if the teams are ready to go, if they’re not, if they’re going to feel great, feel bad. We just have to play, do our best and hope that’s enough. It’s overwhelming to worry about what the other team is going to do because you just don’t know.”
Jacob Trouba also joined Rosen and Roarke for this episode and the New York Rangers captain talked about his evolution as a leader, research he has done on what makes a good leader, expectations for this season and a new hobby he got into during the offseason.
“One of our friends, he’s an artist and he has a studio in Brooklyn,” Trouba said. “I told him I don’t know what I’m going to do when Kelly (his wife) starts working. He said, ‘Do you want to come paint?’ I was like, ‘I’ll try it.’ So we bought a canvas, he taught me the colors, the whole nine, and I did a painting.”
Trouba explained what he painted and his experience doing so later on in the interview.
In addition to the chat with MacKinnon and Trouba, Rosen and Roarke broke down reasons why each would take Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Tampa Bay Lightning as the best goalie in the NHL ahead of the Igor Shesterkin of the Rangers.
Rosen talked about potential reasons why he thinks the Avalanche could get off to a slower than expected start, and each gave predictions for how many goals they believe Washington Capitals forward. Alex Ovechkin will score this season.
The “NHL @TheRink” podcast is free and listeners can subscribe on all podcast platforms. It is also available on NHL.com/multimedia/podcasts and the NHL app.
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