Colorado Avalanche: News from around the NHL September 10th, 2014

Bob McKenzie was on TSN 1050 and had fantastic things to say about MacKinnon.

"And more than anything else, when you've got all those tools - but the insatiable desire to really be excellent and to dominate, and I really think this kid's got it. He's a hockey player. I think this game courses through his veins and I think everything he does has a sense of purpose, and by all accounts of the people I've talked to, that have seen him train and work out this summer, off the charts. I mean, like, veteran NHLers have seen him work out this summer and they're shaking their head and saying, ‘This guy's a machine.'

Meanwhile MacKinnon is heaping praise on his former teammate.

MacKinnon is pretty confident that Jonathan Drouin, his former linemate with the Halifax Mooseheads of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, is ready to take a similar path with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2014-15.

Drouin was voted the No. 1 NHL prospect on NHL.com's Top 60 prospect ranking, released Tuesday.

"I don't see a lot of junior-hockey highlights now but I'm on Twitter and noticed he was tearing it up," MacKinnon said of Drouin. "He had some sick games and I watched the highlights online. I still try and follow the Mooseheads whenever I can."

A follow-up on Benoit, who will be playing in Buffalo this season.

All the while, Benoit, undersized at 5-foot-11, kept posting big offensive numbers. But by the time he reached 29, he had made only eight NHL appearances.

"Sometimes you start to wonder if you're going to get the break you need," Benoit, who signed a one-year, $800,000 contract in July, said last week following a late-summer workout. "That's not easy to come by all that time. But at the same time, you just have to keep motivated and keep plugging at it and never give up, because you never know when that opportunity's going to come."

Benoit's opportunity materialized in January 2013, when the NHL lockout ended. He had returned from Russia months earlier feeling he had "unfinished business."

"I felt like I could still take a shot at the NHL," he said. "I felt like I was good enough to play."

Bob Suter has passed away.

Bob Suter, a defenceman on the 1980 Miracle on Ice team that stunningly won the Olympic gold medal in hockey, died of an apparent heart attack on Tuesday at age 57 in Madison, Wis.

Suter played in all seven games during the U.S. team's improbable run to the gold and in its shocking victory over the then-Soviet Union.

Suter was drafted in the seventh round by the Los Angeles Kings in 1977 but did not make it to the NHL during his playing career. However, his son, Ryan Suter, is now a star for the Minnesota Wild. Suter's brother, Gary, and Ryan Suter both played in the Olympics and won silver medals.

Two arrests have reportedly been made in regards to Derek Boogaards death.

The son of a former NHL defenseman and a doctor from Colorado have been arrested in connection with the death of NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard, according to a report from Fox 5 New York.

Jordan Hart was arrested by the DEA on Long Island Tuesday, according to Fox, for allegedly supplying the drugs that led to Boogaard's death. Hart is the son of Gerry Hart, who played 730 games in the NHL between 1968 and 1983, mostly with the Islanders. In addition to the arrest of Hart, the DEA also reportedly arrested Oscar Johnson, a Colorado physician assistant who routinely wrote Hart prescriptions for the painkillers.