Connor McDavid, right, of the Edmonton Oilers talks with teammates during the first period against the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Wash., on Oct. 2.Steph Chambers/Getty Images
Wayne Gretzky didn’t become ‘Wayne Gretzky’ until the 10th year of his NHL career.
By that point, the most incredible things he would do on the ice – 200-plus points in three consecutive seasons, league MVP eight times in a row – were behind him. He’d never win another Stanley Cup.
But in Year 10, Gretzky became a TV star.
The trick was moving to Los Angeles. Once there, statistical production became just one part of his job. His main function was attracting other, bigger stars to his show. He was also great at that.
For just a minute there in the early 1990s, hockey was the coolest thing going. Gretzky was the human personification of that cool.
When his name is invoked now by famous people, they aren’t talking about the Gretzky who was the greatest offensive force in NHL history. They’re talking about the guy who hosted Saturday Night Live.
Hockey has spent the past three decades trying to recast that celebrity magic. You need a combination of things – the right guy, the right moment, the right milieu and, most important, the right vehicle.
L.A. was Gretzky’s vehicle. Can Amazon be Connor McDavid’s?
This year will be – wait for it – McDavid’s 10th season in the NHL. Like Gretzky, his individual quality isn’t just the unanimously agreed-upon top of class. It’s so far up ahead of the rest that it sometimes seems like everyone else has brakes on their skates.
Like Gretzky, McDavid has mastered the art of the attractive reticence. Neither man is shy, exactly. Shy people hate talking. It’s more that they don’t want to seem self-regarding, and also don’t want to tell a lie, which is a problem when you’re the best. That struggle to talk without blowing your own horn makes people fall in love with you.
Until recently, the through line of McDavid’s NHL story was the generational star stuck on the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. When (if ever) was Edmonton going to figure things out?
Last season, around the new year, the Oilers did that. Then they rode McDavid and a burst of self-confidence into the Stanley Cup final.
The Oilers could’ve had their doors blown off in a sweep, but they struggled back to respectability and lost a squeaker. McDavid won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, but refused to come out and accept it.
When he did finally speak to the media in a back room, McDavid was a picture of devastation. He’d played so hard that his toes had busted through two pairs of thermal socks.
If we’re talking about star building here, none of this could have gone any better. There wouldn’t be any point to Rocky II if Sylvester Stallone had won the first time.
That’s what Gretzky did in L.A. He was great. The team not so much. But they kept getting close. Having done a wonderful job stringing out the anticipation, it was only then that Gretzky truly failed for the first time. He could not provide the finish everyone wanted.
Gretzky played four more years, but his career ended when he left California without a title. McDavid is now in that same star-making chute. All he has to do is point his feet downward and give in to gravity.
The most important part of that process is Amazon’s new Faceoff: Inside the NHL series. It debuts, along with the NHL season, on Friday.
The docudrama focuses on more than a dozen players, but it’s McDavid’s show. You know that because he’s the one screaming in the trailer like a man who’s become totally unglued. Screamers get priority.
The six-part series builds up through the lesser lights. It doesn’t focus on McDavid until the fifth of six episodes. Once there, it shows someone unlike the cyborgian master craftsman we know from first-intermission interviews.
The story progresses from the bottom-of-the-ocean-floor levels of pressure McDavid deals with in Edmonton to the failed comeback in the final. As it turns out, McDavid is the erratic wild man the NHL needs, even if it doesn’t know that.
In a perfect world, the show may also have the effect of convincing a global audience that Edmonton has the scruffy glamour of a Green Bay or a Manchester.
This is all highly dependent on Faceoff being a straight-out-of-the-box success. In that sense, leaving McDavid until last is a risk.
But let’s say it works – meaning that the show is watched and discussed by someone other than Canadians and a few American sports obsessives. That would provide McDavid with the most important piece of the Gretzky-in-L.A. profile – TV stardom.
Then all he has to do is win.
The next 16 months are so perfectly set up to turn McDavid from a hockey concern into an entertainment concern that you’d think Amazon Prime Video and the NHL planned it this way.
First up, the 4 Nations Face-Off in February. After a decade of scandal and creeping international irrelevance, McDavid gets to save Canadian hockey from itself.
April to June he’s got the NHL playoffs. McDavid and the Oilers don’t have to win. They just have to get close again. Winning won’t become non-negotiable for another two or three seasons.
Especially if what everyone expects to go down in February, 2026 works out right – McDavid leads Canada to its first gold medal in Olympic men’s hockey since Sochi in 2014.
That’s the hockey part of the recipe. Then there’s the celebrity part. Is he willing to do U.S. talkshows? How about TikToks? Dog content? Film cameos?
Does McDavid want to be out there shilling himself like a product, because that’s how it works. Tom Brady didn’t become ‘Tom Brady’ until he married a supermodel and became a Page Six fixture. There’s more to this celebrity thing than winning championships. It looks exhausting.
But for the first time since Gretzky, a hockey player is positioned to become bigger than hockey. To maybe become LeBron James or Lionel Messi big.
Being far more famous may not be McDavid’s primary goal in life, but it is the not-so-secret hope of everyone he’s in business with. If he cares to get on board, that rocket ship is about to take off.