The Connor McDavid Lottery, 10 Years Later

When you have a job writing about the Edmonton Oilers, it’s hard not to type out his name at least once in every article.

April 18th, 2015, the 9th year in our team’s Decade of Darkness had just come to a close, finishing 3rd last league-wide. Connor McDavid was the projected top prospect in that year’s draft and a generational talent with otherworldly speed that we’d never seen in some of our lifetimes and could be turned on in the blink of an eye. Coming from the OHL’s Erie Otters, experts labeled him the best young player since Mario Lemieux. Better than Alex Ovechkin? Better than Sidney Crosby? And he’s ours? I sat on my couch at home in front of the TV with the Draft Lottery on. When Edmonton’s card flipped from third to first, and their logo appeared surrounded by gold, all I could do was give a quiet smirk in shock. The Oilers fanbase rejoiced on social media for their new Wayne Gretzky; every other fanbase rolled their eyes. This team was actually selecting First Overall for the fourth time in six years. Their third #1 choice was Nail Yakupov(2012), one of the biggest busts in NHL history. The previous two were Taylor Hall(2010) and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins(2011), good players but not franchise-altering. Only one of those three is still on the team after all this time has passed. I can understand and sympathize with the outrage around the hockey world at that time. Why and how could an organization that can’t build a good roster around three consecutive first overall picks get rewarded once again? All I can say in response to that is we didn’t ask for it. We didn’t ask for so much managerial ineptitude after one Cinderella trip to the Finals. We didn’t ask to sit through 82 games of basement-dwelling hockey for nearly every season. We didn’t ask to be the punchline of every draft lottery joke. Other teams that were also joked about frequently still didn’t have it as bad as we did, we would’ve traded our seasons for theirs.

Okay, so he technically became an Oiler on June 26^th, but even in a very deep draft class, who thought the team would’ve taken someone else or traded the pick? He scored his first NHL goal on October 13th, 2015, against the Dallas Stars, a screen deflection type of goal that we don’t often associate with the fast and flashy phenom. What wasn’t to love about his first 12 NHL appearances? Averaging a point in every game, and Yakupov is finally looking like a legit top 6 winger while playing on his line. Then, on November 3rd, 2015, McDavid collided against the boards with Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Brandon Manning and had to miss three months with a broken collarbone. Yakupov went back to being a bottom six forward, and Leon Draisaitl, who was drafted a year before McDavid at 3rd Overall, called up and put up 7 points as a winger in 3 games with Hall and Nugent-Hopkins, would never see that chemistry blossom again. Coming back on February 2nd against the Columbus Blue Jackets, McDavid would score what I still say is his best in a 5-1 Oilers win. He let the league know he was back, and here for a long time. Despite the 2015-16 season being riddled with many other injuries, Edmonton played pretty decent hockey under a new head coach(Todd McLellan) and GM(Peter Chiarelli). The overall improved on-ice play went unnoticed in the standings, as they’d finish that season with another high draft pick, Jesse Puljujarvi at 4th Overall. 2016-17 rolls around, his sophomore year helped lead Edmonton to break their 10 year Playoff drought. The first of many 100-point seasons in his career earned him Art Ross, Ted Lindsay, and Hart trophies. Even though the Oilers were knocked out in the second round, it was considered a success and a massive improvement. Unfortunately, while McDavid kept racking up the points in the two seasons afterwards, despite highlight reel play after highlight reel play, the team went back to its struggles of not even making the Playoffs.

But on April 6^th 2019, Oilers fans had much greater worries than postseason appearances. In a game against the Calgary Flames, McDavid was driving hard to the net with that insane level of speed. Defenseman Mark Giordano made a play to take away his space, and he ended up getting tripped, with his knee hitting the goal post. While the Oilers and Flames have always had their longstanding rivalry, I’d never suggest that Giordano purposely injured Connor. It’d have been his instinct to help prevent a scoring chance. It wasn’t until the release of a 2020 documentary film, Whatever It Takes, that we really learned the severity of the knee injury. The posterior cruciate ligament, popliteus muscle, medial and lateral meniscus, and tibial plateau are all torn. There was a choice to be made between him, the franchise, and the medical staff. He could’ve either had an offseason surgery keeping him out for most of the following season and have that alter or possibly end his still extremely young career at only 22 years of age. Or he could’ve spent all the time from April to October rehabbing it before the next regular season started. The latter was a bold and risky choice to make, but he made it. And even had I not written that part into this piece, you’d have never known the difference anyway. That’s just how remarkable his recovery was.

Under a new coach(Dave Tippett) and a new GM(Ken Holland), McDavid and the Oilers would start seeing Playoff hockey again. However, both the 2020 and 2021 seasons saw unflattering first round losses. Oilers fans lit up when one of Edmonton’s mainstream sports media personalities wrote this headline: “He needs to have his Yzerman moment”. Let me play Captain Obvious for a second and say that neither the 2020 nor the 2021 Edmonton Oilers should ever be compared to the 1990s and 2000s Detroit Red Wings. McDavid didn’t have Brendan Shanahan for a winger. His team’s defense didn’t have Niklas Lidstrom, Larry Murphy, or Chris Chelios. But while I don’t always agree with Oilers media on some things, reading those words a different way isn’t entirely wrong. Steve Yzerman still holds the record for the most points in a single regular season by a player not named Gretzky or Lemieux, with 155 back in the 1988-89 season. McDavid came close to beating that 2 seasons ago, with 153. You look at Yzerman’s stats from his younger years, he could’ve had way bigger numbers than the 1755 he retired with, which is still a large amount. But when Detroit hired Scotty Bowman as their head coach, he had concerns with Stevie Y’s commitment to team defense. That changed, and that’s part of why Yzerman’s stats started decreasing season after season. He wasn’t out on the ice to just get as many points anymore, I can appreciate that transformation. Both McDavid and Draisaitl have spoken before about trying to be better defensively, Draisaitl recently said he wants to win the Frank J. Selke trophy one day. There’s nothing wrong with any constructive critique on even the best players. They’re human beings, just like you and me. But the difference between 97 and 19 is that 97, as well as 29, really has improved his defensive play without giving up his electrifying offense.

It was in the years 2022, 2023, and 2024 that we truly saw Connor’s evolution as both an on-ice and off-ice leader. Though it’s never ideal for any team to have two midseason coaching changes in three years(Jay Woodcroft and Kris Knoblauch), don’t let that take away what our Captain was able to do. Round 1 in 2022, after the Oilers went down 3-2 in the series against the LA Kings, it’s been said that McDavid guaranteed to his group that they weren’t losing. Scoring the first goal in Game 6, assisting on the first goal, and scoring the insurance marker in Game 7, he wasn’t lying. Perhaps his biggest Playoff highlight was in Round 2 of that same year, the first postseason Battle of Alberta in three decades. Many predicted the Calgary Flames to topple the Oilers. But McDavid silenced those predictions with the Overtime victory in Game 5 to end the series and cement his name in the Rivalry’s history. The Oilers would lose in Round 3, then not go passed the second round the following year. But what a bounce-back 2024 wound up being. His team was 2nd last in the league before US Thanksgiving, another coaching change happened, McDavid was playing with a nagging injury, hindering his on-ice effect. He and the mentally broken Oilers willed their way out of Hockey Hell with 8 game and 16 game winning streaks, the latter tied a league record. What he said in the locker room the night they clinched a Playoff spot couldn’t have been worded any better. “If this year has taught us anything, it’s that when we stick together like brothers and we work together and we stick with it, we can f***ing do anything. We brought ourselves back from the f***ing dead this year, and it’s a credit to everybody in this room.” Another viral McDavid speech is his raw emotion and frustration after Game 2 of the Finals. If it didn’t make you want to run through a wall, you’re not watching the same sport.

Bob Stauffer frequently calls him the most advanced player the game has ever seen, and he’s still only 28. There’s a good 10 years left to look forward to. But where should he rank among the all-time greats? This is always a fun little debate, isn’t it? Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe are always the undisputed top 4, and if you include goalies in a top 10, Patrick Roy needs to be #5. McDavid became the 4th fastest player to reach 1000 points this season and is on pace to be the league’s second 2000 point player before he retires. But comparisons made through individual stats are always subjective. Jaromir Jagr could’ve also reached 2000 points if he didn’t play 3 seasons in the KHL. How much closer to Gretzky’s stats would Lemieux’s stats be if he didn’t have those back injuries? When he came back after missing 3 full seasons, he was still a 90 point player. Sidney Crosby’s skillset hasn’t aged yet, but how much did his early 2010s concussions rob us of? Alex Ovechkin just passed Gretzky’s goal record this month, but would’ve already done that 2 or 3 seasons ago and perhaps scored 1000 goals, were it not for two lockouts and a global pandemic. Those last two are the icons I grew up following when I first became a hockey fan, and they still make me drop my jaw from time to time. Mark Messier is the game’s greatest leader. Does he warrant a top 10 spot?

I believe that if the Edmonton Oilers completed that comeback from 3-0 down in the Finals last year, especially with McDavid winning the Conn Smythe trophy, we’d all be placing him on the sport’s Mount Rushmore. This season, he finally got his Team Canada moment with the Four Nations Face-Off being held. Like Crosby a decade ago, he would score an iconic tournament winning goal in OT against our country’s rival, Team USA. He barely celebrated with the tournament trophy in his hands, not because he didn’t appreciate the victory, but because he’s still painstakingly searching for something else.