To be considered the greatest player in the history of the Edmonton Oilers, you have to be considered the greatest player in the history of hockey.
Connor McDavid is expected to fight for the latter, at least in the eyes of his family, because his father lied about his age so that the little prodigy who was skating and shooting in the basement could join a real youth league before it was. Allowed. Connor was three at the time.
McDavid, at least one of Oiler fans’ dreams, is expected to compete for the first since the stars aligned in 2015 and Edmonton had the first overall pick just as he turned 18, fresh off a junior season in which he Achieved 120 points in just 45 games.
And so Wayne Gretzy’s old team got the next – maybe – Wayne Gretzky; the hockey gods are paying back the franchise and fanbase 27 years after the original saved a Stanley Cup juggernaut for Los Angeles.
Gretzky remains Gretzky, even all these years later, a seemingly impossible comparison, just a record book full of cartoon songs.
Still, they’re not the stats Oiler fans crave. It’s not even the overnight brilliance of how McDavid puts up his goals and assists. That’s all in good fun, especially during the cold Northern Alberta winters and summer outdoor viewing parties.
But at the end of the day, the NHL is all about the Stanley Cup and the Stanley Cup alone, something Edmonton hasn’t seen since 1990.
McDavid came into Friday night’s Game 6 at home, trailing Florida 3-2, but with a chance to do something even Gretzky never did: bring a team back from a 3-0 deficit in the Finals. No one has done this since 1942.
To say this is all McDavid is not accurate or fair. Hockey is the ultimate team game. Even McDavid averages less than 24 minutes of ice time in the finals.
Still, it doesn’t minimize what he might be doing. Florida is a phenomenal team. Behind a brutal lead and stars like Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Sergei Bobrovsky, they overwhelmed everyone in these playoffs, including Edmonton in the first three games. The cup seemed to have been won.
Since then, however, the Oilers have defeated the Panthers 13-4 and had them postpone two Cup celebrations — including one at South Beach — to, in McDavid’s words, “drag them back to Alberta” and face what would be a deafening Rogers must be. Place.
With ESPN/ABC ratings rising and the NBA Finals completed, this is one of the most anticipated NHL games: the best player in the sport trying to continue making history against what almost everyone believed was the best team was in the competition.
It’s McDavid, 27, who is leading the way in every sense, showing his full talent and full promise on the biggest stage. He has eight points from the last two games. His 42 points in the play-offs are just five short of Gretzky’s record of 47 in 1985. He does it with flair, but also with grit and determination, the perfect player at the perfect time. His highlight reels seem impossible to stop.
“He puts this team on his back,” teammate Corey Perry said. “If we are against the wall, he puts us on his back and plays.”
This is McDavid – seemingly unfazed by the pressure, simply dominating the game as he always did growing up in the Toronto suburbs.
“You spend your whole life working to get into a position like this,” McDavid said Thursday. “When you are here, you expect a magical feeling [but] it’s been pretty normal.”
This is what Edmonton fans rightly expected when McDavid arrived. They knew what generational greatness looked like and there was little doubt that McDavid had it. Maybe he wouldn’t be as great as Gretzky – or maybe he would – but he didn’t have to be. He just had to be great.
McDavid has delivered — he should win a fourth Hart Trophy this season — but the franchise hasn’t. Success came slowly: it took seven seasons to reach the conference finals. Hockey was left with the kind of flashy, dynamic stars who played mostly late at night and away from the postseason spotlight for mid-major teams.
This season it came together. The Oilers at one point won sixteen straight games, just behind Pittsburgh’s record of seventeen in 1992-93 (also no overtime at the time). Now they are two games out of the cup with momentum, if that, behind them.
Gretzky led the Oilers to four Cups in five years in the mid-1980s, but then left for the LA Kings on what is considered by some to be a day of local, if not national, mourning.
He has said over the years that if he had stayed in Edmonton on a team that still had Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Esa Tikkanen, Grant Fuhr and others, he thought they could have won four or more Cups ( they won one without him at least in 1990).
Those glory days have spawned a seemingly endless drought, even with the next great hockey star on the roster. A week ago, this season also seemed doomed. However, Friday is different, a new opportunity, a new time.
Connor McDavid has dragged Florida back to Alberta and dragged the Oilers back from the brink. One more game to enforce another game and perhaps fulfill a legacy that everyone saw coming.
