EDMONTON — After setting new career highs in goals, assists and points last season — then piling up 33 points in 16 playoff games — did anyone really believe that Connor McDavid could do it all over again in 2022-23?
“Probably just himself,” offered Oilers defenceman Mattias Ekholm. “He’s the one that’s pushing the limits every year, and it says so much about him.
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“Never satisfied. Wants to do more. Wants to see how far he can go with his game. Just pushing boundaries and limits every year he’s been in the league.”
Here in Edmonton, anyone over the age of about 45 will admit to you that, back in the ’80s, we all were numbed by the barrage of surreal numbers posted by Wayne Gretzky. Year after year he posted stats that dwarfed whatever his peers across the National Hockey League were doing, to the point that, today, if you erased all 894 goals that he scored, Gretzky’s 1,963 assists would still make him the game’s all-time leading point-getter.
Then along comes McDavid, who followed last year’s career season with lifetime highs in goals (64) assists (89) and points (153) in 82 games.
Those 153 points are two points shy of Steve Yzerman’s 155 points in 1988-89 — which is the highest total of any NHL player not named Wayne or Mario.
As he approached that milestone, the 26-year-old was nonplussed.
“If it gets there, you get there,” he shrugged, his focus on continuing the nine-game winning streak that the Edmonton Oilers take into their Round 1 meeting with Los Angeles, beginning Monday in Edmonton.
Across the National Hockey League however, the superlatives are many.
“I didn’t think we were going to see someone like that,” New York Rangers centre Mika Zibanejad told NHL.com’s Dan Rosen. “It’s just, I mean, at one point you just have to laugh and say, ‘This is crazy.’”
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“He just finds a way to keep raising the bar,” added Sidney Crosby, the generational player whose career-high 120-point season was surpassed by McDavid last season. “He’s just found a way. Whenever everyone thinks that there’s no way he can build on that, he finds a way to do it. That says a lot about him.”
You’d have to search far and wide to find someone suggesting that today’s 64 goals and 153 points can’t be tomorrow’s 65-plus and more than 160 points.
Oilers teammate Zach Hyman laughs at the question: Can it keep getting better?
“If you ask him, he’s not going to get worse next year. That’s not the goal,” Hyman said. “Knowing him, he’ll be back at it working on whatever he thinks he needs to work on — and I don’t know what that is…”
But goal scoring and points production are not the only areas where McDavid has made conscious improvement.
Off the ice, with the media, McDavid has bent — resigned himself? — to the fact that he is the face of the game, whether he wants to be or not. His opinion will be sought and over the course of a season the interviews will be many.
It is not McDavid’s way to do anything that is ill conceived or poorly thought out, whether on the ice or off. That’s just how he is wired.
So stumbling through interviews without saying anything of consequence made little sense, and he has worked this season to be a better and more interesting quote. The next step will be talking about himself, but he’s not there yet.
Ask McDavid about his own accomplishments and the answers get short. But ask to him to look down on his career from 30,000 feet, and if the prerequisite to being in the Crosby-Gretzky conversation is a Stanley Cup, he’ll go there now.
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“Really, really, really important,” he said. “It’s not lost on me how important that is. It’s something that I’ve dreamed of my whole life, and that’s why I play this game. That’s my focus — what I put every everything into.
“Of course it’s important.”
He’s given the first half of his career to Edmonton, with nothing but a truckload of hard lessons (and a pretty good paycheque) in return.
That old trope about the Oilers needing to win before the contracts of McDavid and Leon Draisaitl expire and they leave town? Well, he’s in a bigger hurry to win in Edmonton than any fan could be.
“We want to do it here. There are no secrets there. We don’t beat around the bush,” he said. “Everybody wants to win, and we’re no different.”
But he’s not done there, like he used to be.
“Everybody has a different path to winning. Every player,” he said, “Some win early, some win later. For us, we’ve had to kind of build something here, which we also feel equally proud of as well.
“So I’m impatient, yes. At the same time, I know that it’s a process, and that every little experience is leading towards, hopefully, ultimately (winning) one day.”
His teammates see it. Like the other night in Colorado when, with the Oilers on the power play in overtime, McDavid told defenceman Evan Bouchard to fake a pass and use him as a decoy, then walk in and shoot using the room created when the Avs defender scrambled to defend No. 97.
Bouchard scored the game-winner.
“That’s what’s so cool about this whole thing too,” marvelled Ekholm. “You can ask him about any of his own personal accomplishments, but he understands that to be mentioned with the best you’ve got to win the Cup. He’s so aware of this, and that’s what he works for every day.
“And if you ask him if he thinks it’s cool to be over 155 points, I think he would rather take the team thing all day, all night.”
And all spring long.
McDavid’s 2022-23 Accomplishments
• The first player in NHL history to have three separate points streaks of 15 or more games in the same season.
• The fifth player to lead the league in goals, assists and points at season’s end, joining Gretzky (five times), Phil Esposito, Gordie Howe, and Howie Morenz.
• McDavid has had seven games this season where he was completely held off the score sheet. By comparison, he has had nine four-point nights, 12 three-point nights, and 23 two-point nights.
• McDavid becomes the sixth player to win the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s top points man at least five times in his career. Gretzky (10 times), Howe (six), Mario Lemieux (six), Phil Esposito (five), and Jaromir Jagr (five).
Gretzky (seven times) is the only other player to lead the league in scoring at least five times before his 27th birthday.
• This is McDavid’s third straight Art Ross, something only five others have done; he joins Lemieux (three times) as the only two players ever to notch 70 power-play points in a season.
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