(2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs) Tales From the Clipped: How did Dallas shut down Nathan MacKinnon?

Spoiler alert: it was a team effort.

There are few better players in the NHL than Nathan MacKinnon. Since he entered the league in 2013, he has 899 regular season points, behind only Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby. McDavid and Auston Matthews are probably the only centers I’d take over him (probably a hot take for everyone that blames Matthews alone on Toronto disappearing in the playoffs). Even then there are shifts where I’m not sure. Regardless of where you rank him, he’s in a very special, very singular class.

However, the 2024 Dallas Stars had an answer for him. Normally, there’s a caveat to that. Maybe MacKinnon was injured. Maybe he lost his linemates, or maybe he was unlucky. And normally, even if none of those were serious pieces to a plausible explanation, they’d at least factor in parts. But nope. Not in this series.

Yes, losing Valeri Nichushkin was kind of a big deal, but that doesn’t explain the shift-to-shift silence. MacKinnon scored 140 points this year, his highest ever. With or without Nichushkin, 2024 MacKinnon was Peak MacKinnon. Yet he was held pointless in three of the six games versus the Stars. In 68 minutes versus Chris Tanev (more on him below), MacKinnon was outscored three to one. At 1.65 expected goals, Colorado’s top pivot was fourth on his own team, and well below the gold standards set in the series by Wyatt Johnston (2.32) and Tyler Seguin (2.36, which led all players).

However, I want to be clear by what I mean by “shut down.” MacKinnon will never be shut down in a literal sense. He still generated chances of course. But to the extent that anyone can contain MacKinnon in a best-of-seven, the Stars accomplished that. His 1.65 expected goals is not exactly 0, but compared to his rate of 3.28 in the regular season, that’s a massive gap, and for Dallas, a massive accomplishment.

“Shut down” might be a little bit of clickbait, but not really. I’d argue that it’s fairly descriptive given the impressive body of work by a lot of Dallas players, and particularly true of how the Stars shut down elements of MacKinnon’s game. So how did Dallas do it? How did Dallas stop hockey’s immoveable force?

The answer is one part obvious—cough, Tanev—and one part not so obvious.