The steady stream of players heading to the medical rooms at West Lakes this season, Mackay himself is just back from a month-long hamstring strain, has severely hampered the conditioning of the group, but Mackay still feels progress is being made.
"It was a really good style of footy we were able to play in the first three quarters, but I think we just ran out of legs at the end," Mackay said.
"They were able to start streaming forward and we just couldn't stop them. They were able to score pretty easily which is really disappointing.
"We were certainly feeling pretty good going into the last quarter, we felt like we were really in the game and we had shown that we could score pretty quickly if we needed to, but in the end we just couldn't stop their momentum.
"They’ve got some high-quality players and they really hit some form in the last quarter. It's pretty tough to finish the way we did, but certainly it was pretty encouraging to play the way we did earlier in the game."
Despite a slow start, Adelaide doggedly clawed back into the contest and stuck with St Kilda throughout the first three terms.
The Crows hit the front a couple of times in the third period and Mackay liked what he saw.
"We were able to get our hands on the footy, get it forward and play a lot of the game in our forward half which obviously gives us the most opportunity to score," he said.
"We got at them pretty well, pressured them and moved the ball okay ourselves so there were a lot of encouraging signs, but it's disappointing to not be able to finish that off."
A horror season for the Crows got worse in the lead-up to Saturday's clash with Simon Goodwin's tearful retirement announcement and the unfortunate circumstances of Tyson Edwards' departure from the game.
Mackay agreed it had been an emotional week, but didn't feel the playing group had been adversely affected on Saturday night.
"I don't think so, you'd probably have to ask guys individually if they were affected by it, but I don't think it had much effect on whether we'd perform or not today," he said.
"It's probably going to be a pretty big week next week as well so we'll just stick together as a playing group and just make sure we play the best footy we can."
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