With finals off the agenda in recent years, the public holiday blockbuster was widely thought to be the biggest day of the season for Melbourne players, which they made a special effort to get themselves up for.
Not so according to McLean.
"My view is 'why treat this game any differently to any other game?'" McLean said from Casey Fields on Friday.
"Four points are still up for grabs. We're trying to create a winning culture at this footy club and I don't think you can go out and put one game in front of another in terms of importance.
"Obviously everyone's watching and there are going to be 70 or 80,000 people there, but we'll treat it like any other game. There's four points still up for grabs and we go out there, like every week, trying to get a win.
"That's my mentality and I'm sure the rest of the blokes feel the same."
Monday's big game has added excitement for Dees supporters with the wraps coming off No.1 draft pick Jack Watts. McLean is looking forward to seeing the talented youngster strut his stuff, but maintained he is just one cog in the Melbourne machine.
"We don't put any more added expectation on him, we just expect him to go out and play a role like we do every player," he said.
"He's going to be a very good player for the footy club and it doesn't matter whether you're the first or the last picked in the draft – your first game is always going to be the most memorable.”
McLean also took the opportunity to right a perceived wrong in the way the well-publicised pre-season boxing session involving him and Watts went down.
"It was played out like a bit of a 'fight club', but it was just something that was mis-portrayed in the media," he said.
"We were just doing a little bit of sparring one-on-one. We were only throwing left jabs and he put his hands up to block a punch and I've hit his hands and his hands have hit his nose. So in the end it was his own two hands [that gave him a blood nose].
"It was really just a public school bloke trying to toughen up a private school boy."
