Nathan MacKinnon is doing it again.
It's hardly a surprise.
"He is an absolute horse," former NHL defenseman Jason Demers said on the "NHL @TheRink" podcast last week. "It's hard to argue against MacKinnon year in and year out."
The Colorado Avalanche center leads the NHL with 68 points (15 goals, 53 assists) in 44 games, putting him on pace to win the Art Ross Trophy as the League's leading scorer for the first time.
MacKinnon finished second last season with 140 points (51 goals, 89 assists), four fewer than Tampa Bay Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov.
That he's tearing up the League again, doing it while helping to carry what has been a fairly beat-up team through the first half, is why MacKinnon is the favorite at the halfway point to win the Hart Trophy for the second straight season, according to a vote of 16 writers and editors from NHL.com.
The Avalanche have had 197 man-games lost to injury this season, including 147 among forwards Jonathan Drouin, Miles Wood, Artturi Lehkonen, Ross Colton, Ivan Ivan and Valeri Nichushkin, who also missed the first 17 games on a suspension, and Gabriel Landeskog, who hasn't played yet.
"They've had tons of noise this year," Demers said on the podcast. "They've had tons of injuries. They were playing with like two lines of AHL players and he was just producing, producing, producing. He kept them within striking distance. Now, they've gotten a little bit healthy and you just see them taking off, and that's a big credit to him."
The Avalanche are 12-4-1 since Dec. 7 with MacKinnon leading them with 28 points (six goals, 22 assists), including 16 points in an eight-game point streak that started Dec. 19 and ended in a 3-1 loss at the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday.
Colorado got off to a 14-13-0 start this season, but MacKinnon had 40 points (nine goals, 31 assists), in those 27 games, including 25 in a season-opening 13-game point streak.
"If you could control things, I would have five goals every night," MacKinnon told NHL.com earlier this season. "So, no matter who is in the lineup, I just try to play my best, and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not that great. But I always try to do be as good as I can, and I feel like that's everyone’s mentality in our room."
MacKinnon is NHL.com’s pick to win the Hart, but hardly by a landslide; he edged Kirill Kaprizov of the Minnesota Wild by seven voting points, 60-53. MacKinnon received seven of the 16 first-place votes. Kaprizov got five.
Kucherov, Edmonton Oilers forward Leon Draisaitl, Vegas Golden Knights forward Jack Eichel and Winnipeg Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck each got one first-place vote.
Kaprizov, who has missed nine straight games with a lower-body injury, has 50 points in 34 games. He was seven points behind MacKinnon when Kaprizov last played Dec. 23.
