Nathan MacKinnon’s visit to Minnesota started with goggles, flippers and a secretly filmed pool workout, and it ended with the Avalanche one win from their first Western Conference final berth since 2022. A video that surfaced on X on Friday evening showed the 30-year-old doing a kick drill in a Minnesota pool, and the clip has since drawn more than 4 million views.
Colorado coach Jared Bednar had a little fun with it after the video spread, joking about spies in our hotel. The image fit a familiar script around MacKinnon, whose routines have long fed the sense that he is always looking for an edge. The pool clip was posted by the Minnesota-based account 10,000 Takes without his knowledge, but it landed at the end of another heavy playoff stretch for the Avalanche’s star center.
MacKinnon scored two goals in two games during Colorado’s split in Minnesota and logged more than 20 minutes in both. In five-on-five play, the Avalanche held a 69.53 percent expected goal share when he was on the ice in Minnesota, according to Natural Stat Trick. He also has 12 points in eight games this postseason, numbers that sit on top of a regular season that already made him a Hart Trophy finalist earlier in the series after a 127-point campaign.
The postseason résumé keeps growing in a year when MacKinnon also led the NHL in goals and finished with a league-high 97 points at five-on-five. This is his fourth consecutive season finishing at least fourth in Hart Trophy voting, a run that underlines how long he has been operating at the center of the league’s conversation without leaving much room for doubt about his value.
Bednar said MacKinnon’s habits are part of what drives him. He described the approach as a mentality and said MacKinnon leads the charge, always talking about what players are doing in their own sport and in other sports to get better. Bednar added that MacKinnon will leave no stone unturned, and that whatever he has done from his rookie season to now is working. He also said there is no one else like him in the league, pointing to his speed, skill, physicality, emotion and passion, and calling him one of one.
The video itself arrived during a series that had already shown MacKinnon’s influence in different ways. In Game 3, he scored Colorado’s lone goal after Daemon Hunt knocked Gabriel Landeskog into goalie Jesper Wallstedt. On Monday night, a Wild fan wore goggles when shown on the Jumbotron, a nod to the clip that had already taken on a life of its own around the arena and online.
Colorado answered in Game 4 with depth goals from Ross Colton and Parker Kelly, winning in Minnesota and moving within one victory of the Western Conference final. The on-ice result matters more than the pool video, but the two have become part of the same story: an Avalanche team leaning on its star, and a star who keeps finding ways to make people look twice.
What happens next is plain enough. Colorado goes home with a chance to close out the series, and MacKinnon goes with it, carrying the kind of form that turns a viral clip into a footnote beside a playoff run that is still very much alive.
