His dream of playing in the National Hockey League is all but dead for New Mexico Scorpions defenseman Aaron MacInnis, the team’s only all-star this season.

That’s not to say his future in hockey is cloudy. It’s bright, in fact, because he’s prepared to be happy coaching the game he grew up with. In fact, he’s helping head coach Randy Murphy and working with some of the younger defensemen.

“The older guys are expected to bring a level every night and do your job. He’s a little harder on the younger guys that maybe didn’t go through that process yet,” MacInnis explained. “The offensive side of it, he’s awesome, like that’s the kind of player he was. Defensively, too, he teaches very well, he’s a good communicator, very level-headed.”

Aaron MacInnis is the Scorpions' only all-star this season.

When you’re born in Canada you have to skate and play the game of hockey, and that came easily for MacInnis, now 30 and in his third season with the Scorps.

“Our town – there’s about 900 people up there – so we skated. We were pretty fortunate, actually, as kids. We lived near the rink; my grandfather used to be the manager. If there were any snow days, we got free ice. We skated from early in the morning to four in the afternoon. … Every kid in our town thought they were going to go to the NHL.”

Still, playing hockey beats fishing for lobsters, which is something else he’s done to earn money.

“For me, at this point, I just love playing hockey. There’s lots of other things I could do, but I choose to play this,” he said. He’d even do it for free.

An uncle, Al MacInnis, played for 23 seasons and had the wickedest slap shot in the NHL in his days with the St. Louis Blues and the Calgary Flames. Uncle Al is in the Hockey Hall of Fame and is the vice president of hockey operations for the Blues.

Uncle Al provided him with a lot of advice, Aaron MacInnis says, the most important of which was, “The only thing you can ever control in hockey is your work ethic. You can’t control what a coach thinks, what other players think, what’s going to happen. You control what you can do.”

MacInnis, who wears No. 4 for the Scorpions, can do a lot on the ice, and he also boasts a wicked slap shot. Just ask opposing goalies what the puck looks like as it approaches them after being unleashed from just inside the blue line.

MacInnis has had his two most-productive seasons, offensively, with the Scorpions, amassing 12 and then 10 goals the past two seasons, with 76 points in that span. In his first season here, 2006-07, he led the league’s defensemen with five game-winning goals.

Now, though, he’s without his blue-line partner, fan favorite Vladimir Hartinger, who’s playing in Europe.

“It is … a little bit of an adjustment,” he admitted, not seeing No. 2 opposite him. “I kind of have to look before I do things now. Before, when me and Vlady were together the last two years – it’s funny; we come from opposite ends of the world – but it seemed like when we played together we could read off each other all the time. We played the same style.”

Like most of the veteran players in the Central Hockey League, MacInnis’s path has been twisting and long: stops have included five seasons in juniors, four seasons at the University of Prince Edward Island, stints with teams in Cincinnati, Texas, Victoria and Stockton in the East Coast Hockey League, and then what’s become a three-season stop in Rio Rancho.

It’s a nice place to come back after the summer ends, and while you’re dropping ice into your soft drinks to stay refreshed, MacInnis spends most of his summer months on the ice.

“I had a good off-season this year. Me and my wife went home to Port Hood, Nova Scotia,” he said. “I actually started a painting contracting business by myself. I painted a few houses and churches. I golfed. I fished. (I stayed) pretty busy.

“Then in the middle of August – my father runs a major midget hockey team that my youngest brother plays on and is the captain this year – I helped run their training camp, ran the bench and ran practices until the regular season, when my father took over and that’s pretty much when (I came back to New Mexico). The first few weeks I was in skates and gloves, running practices. After that, I put my gear on and worked with their defensemen. I own a hockey school, in its sixth year, and all the kids within a two-hour radius come to my hockey school. It’s six days long – we average between 125 to 150 kids, so I run that.”

Despite his countless games and shifts on the ice, MacInnis is anything but complacent. He’s always learning more about the game he loves.

“I’m always looking for stuff. I’m always watching games on TV or talking to my uncles or talking to other coaches,” he said. “Always looking at different aspects, at different players.”

Rio Rancho has an advantage over his native Nova Scotia.

“Here, I like the weather – it’s nice and dry,” he said. “Me and my wife love it here. The people are great. We have a dog.

“We’ve lived a lot of other different places and this, Rio Rancho/Albuquerque, seems our speed,” he explained. “Everybody’s welcoming and it reminds us a lot of our old home in Nova Scotia. Obviously, we miss our family and friends.”

The carrot is still out there: “I want to keep playing. I don’t ever want to stop and then, a year goes by, and regret it and I can’t come back.”

The NHL dream is dead, he admitted, but, “(I want to) keep playing professionally and gain as much knowledge as I can and hopefully someday move into a coaching role or some aspect of the game.”

Of course, he wishes the team had more fans coming out to the Star Center.

“We’ve always had a great, hard-working, exciting team,” MacInnis said. “We’re just glad to have new people come to the game and experience the whole experience of pro hockey.”