Nathan MacKinnon appears at No. 5 on Sportsnet’s list of the top 100 NHL players of 2018–19 and over the course of last season, no one climbed farther and faster than the Colorado Avalanche centre. Would anyone have had him in the top 50 at this time last year? No chance. MacKinnon was coming off a hugely disappointing 2016–17 season: 16 goals and 37 assists in 82 games for a team that clinched the league’s worst record with about a month left to play. His best season to that point was his first, back in 2013–14 when he scored 24 goals and registered 39 assists, enough to win the Calder Trophy before his 19th birthday.

Last season, though, everything fell into place for MacKinnon. He became the undisputed face of the franchise when Matt Duchene was traded to Ottawa. After landing on Colorado’s first line, with Avs captain Gabriel Landeskog on his left side and Mikko Rantanen on his right, his numbers took a quantum leap: 39 goals and 58 assists, for 97 points over 74 games. If Vancouver defenceman Alex Edler hadn’t caught him with a high hit in late January and put him out of the lineup for a couple of weeks, MacKinnon would have challenged Connor McDavid for the scoring title. Still, by leading the Avs to the playoffs for the first time in four seasons, MacKinnon was one of three finalists for the Hart Trophy and was voted onto the Second All-Star Team, ahead of a few certain Hall of Famers, including Evgeni Malkin and, yeah, MacKinnon’s neighbour on Grand Lake. Some reviews even surpassed that. “[Pittsburgh coach] Mike Sullivan told me after we played against the Avs that Nathan was the best player we faced all season,” O’Brien says.

Did anyone see this coming? The strange thing is that some of the game’s biggest names had strong suspicions that MacKinnon was destined to become not just a franchise player but something more than that. They had seen him do almost unimaginable things, occasionally in games in the league, more than a few times away from the arena. To them it wasn’t a matter of whether he was going to break through, but when — or even why-not-already? They knew all the pieces were there, probably more than MacKinnon himself.