McDavid does it all, but stat sheet doesn’t care
Oilers star bemoans not having ‘any luck’ on a night where the puck just wouldn’t go in
One of these days, Connor McDavid is bound to snap.
He plays like he did Sunday at the Air Canada Centre — dancing, singing, playing an instrument, conducting the orchestra — and not a single note registers on the night.
This wasn’t just another of 82 NHL dates for McDavid. The 20-year-old grew up just up the freeway in suburban Richmond Hill, Ont. This is where he turns it up just a notch, in the place where he used to sit with his dad and watch games.
That’s how he played it Sunday night. He played it like no one else can play it with Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky and Paul Coffey in the building. There have been all kinds of special players in hockey history. But Orr, his agent, and Gretzky, his Edmonton mentor, and Coffey, whom he has come to know, were the kind of players you couldn’t take your eyes off. You followed them the way we normally follow the puck.
McDavid is now the No. 1 attraction in hockey, carrying the puck from behind his own net the way Orr once did, using a speed only Coffey can understand and finding those open around him the way only Gretzky could.
That was McDavid on Sunday night — even some Edmonton front office people were saying he was maybe as great as he’s ever been — and both he and his snakebit Oilers had nothing to show for it. They were somehow shut out 1-0 by the outplayed Leafs and backup goaltender Curtis McElhinney.
McDavid did just about everything: He created offence. He set up players. He used his speed to make the Leafs look helpless. He hit goalposts. He hit cross bars. He hit men open in the slot. He had a five-point kind of night with no points on the scorecard. How long can you do this and not explode?
“You want it to go on five, 10 minutes longer,” McDavid said after, clearly shaken by the 1-0 defeat. “We didn’t have any luck tonight.”
Before that, he said: “For a 1-0 hockey game, this was pretty entertaining.”
He was correct. This was the best night at the ACC this season as pure entertainment, and the most surprising. You watch this kind of game and you want to scream at the National Hockey League for its geography. Toronto and Edmonton meet twice a year, and that’s it.
Even on a night when Auston Matthews was missing, you wished there was hockey like this every night.
“Two pretty exciting teams when they’re going,” Oilers head coach Todd McLellan said.
It may happen one day in a Stanley Cup final. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll all feel a little cheated along the way.
Gretzky never played Mario Lemieux in a playoff series. Sidney Crosby has yet to face Jonathan Toews. Toronto and McDavid: That would be hockey heaven, no matter what the result.
“You don’t get anything for being close,” McDavid said, knowing how far down the Oilers are in the standings, knowing that every loss brings them one game farther from qualifying for the playoffs. “We were the better team.”
An NHL without McDavid in the playoffs is a poorer league for it, but there are four months yet to figure this all out.
“This is nothing more than an Oilers-Leafs matchup,” he said before the game, even realizing those words didn’t necessarily ring true.
It was more everything than just another game. McDavid played it that way. He didn’t just put on a show Sunday night, he was the show.