If we’re being honest, wearing goggles in a swimming pool barely qualifies as behavior anymore—it’s just common sense with straps.

Let’s start there with Nathan MacKinnon, because the reaction to him casually showing up at a hotel pool with goggles and flippers has been… a bit dramatic, to say the least. The goggles part especially feels like a non-story. If you’ve ever opened your eyes underwater in a public pool without them, you learn pretty quickly that chlorine doesn’t exactly discriminate. It burns, it blurs everything, and it lingers just long enough to make you regret the decision entirely. So yeah—wearing goggles in that situation isn’t wild behavior so to speak. It’s just smart.

And if you're ridiculously allergic to the world like I am, it could do a lot of damage to your skin, and more importantly for a superstar hockey player, your eyes.

When you’re preparing to face a desperate Minnesota Wild team down 2–0 heading into a homestand, the last thing you need is a pair of messed up eyes. So in that sense, goggles feel less like a quirky detail and more like the same category as stretching, hydration, or getting enough sleep.

From that angle, it’s hard to treat it as anything other than practical. Athletes recover, they loosen up, they stay active between games—it’s not unusual for that mindset to spill over into whatever environment they’re in. A hotel pool during a playoff stretch is just another place to move the body and keep things ticking over.

I’ll admit, I don’t fully understand the flipper component. That’s not something I’ve ever personally brought into a public pool setting, and I’m not entirely sure I could explain the exact situation in which I would. But I also feel like that’s part of the point here: I’m not a professional hockey player, I don’t have a Rocket Richard Trophy sitting anywhere, and I definitely don’t have a Stanley Cup on my résumé. So there’s a limit to how confidently I can define what “normal recovery behavior” should look like for someone who operates at that level.

Elite athletes often carry their training habits into places most people associate with downtime. What reads as unusual to an outside observer can simply be routine maintenance to the person doing it. The setting—hotel pool versus training facility—matters less than the intent behind it.

That said, public pools do come with their own quiet social expectations. People tend to assume a shared sense of relaxation, not structured athletic drills with equipment usually reserved for open water training or lifeguard certification courses. So it’s understandable that the image creates a bit of a double take. Not outrage, necessarily—just curiosity mixed with mild confusion.

But that’s probably where the reaction should stop.

There’s a tendency, especially with high-profile athletes, to over-interpret every small behavior as if it reveals something larger about personality or mindset. More often than not, it doesn’t. Sometimes a pair of flippers is just a pair of flippers, and sometimes a pool is just the nearest available body of water after a long day of playoff hockey.

MacKinnon’s game doesn’t need defending, and neither does his choice of pool accessories. If anything, it probably says less about eccentricity and more about consistency—someone who doesn’t fully switch off just because the surroundings change.

And if the flippers still look a little unusual to the rest of us, that might say more about how far removed most people are from that level of routine than anything else.