Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid prepares to shoot against Dallas Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger during overtime in Game 1 of the NHL hockey Western Conference Stanley Cup playoff finals in Dallas, on May 23.Tony Gutierrez/The Associated Press
Every playoff series has its sliding-doors moment. If this had happened instead of that, everything would have ended up different.
Generally, these instants don’t happen until you’re well down the road. But the Oilers had theirs in Thursday night’s Game 1 of their Western Conference final against the Stars.
Edmonton gave up the lead in the third period, sending the game in Dallas to overtime. The Oilers’ Connor McDavid took a four-minute penalty off the faceoff to start OT. The Stars hit two posts. Like everything else in Texas, the Oilers’ net was starting to look bigger.
Then an Edmonton three-on-two. Zach Hyman pulled up in the Stars’ zone and began to spin slowly, like a boat reversing direction. In the postseason, this will usually get you knocked out. But the move so unsettled the Dallas defence that they all began to collapse onto him. Hyman fired the puck toward the front of the net, where McDavid was standing by himself.
McDavid plus time to manoeuvre plus front of net plus no defender equals goal 100 per cent of the time. That is a rule of hockey reasoning. It is true because it works.
McDavid moved to his left, where the net was open. Dallas goalie Jake Oettinger sprawled toward him. McDavid had four feet of goal to shoot at. He hit four inches of stick. That was the moment.
You could see it spinning out from there. Dallas scores. McDavid takes the blame. The series spirals. We’re back to wondering if the best player in hockey is ever going to figure it out.
Instead, McDavid scored a more difficult one in the second OT period, picking a hard pass out of the air and redirecting it at 90 degrees into the Stars’ net.
“Always nice to score an overtime goal,” McDavid said afterward.
Whatever this guy decides to do once hockey ends, keynote speaker is probably off the table.
After one game, there are two things we can guess about this series – it is going to be even more of a whiplash affair than the previous one against Vancouver; and, for good or ill, McDavid will be the story of it.
So far, he’s had the sort of playoffs only he could have. He’s second in postseason scoring (23 points in 13 games), but hasn’t been great. Until Thursday, he’d gone five games without a goal. If you follow the daily reviews, teammates such as Evan Bouchard and Leon Draisaitl are receiving better notices. Even the Edmonton goalies are getting more press.
If Mitch Marner played as McDavid is now, the Leafs would be doing three news conferences a day, the theme of each one being ‘Told you so.’ But when McDavid is only setting up two goals a night, it’s a downer.
Nine years into his career, McDavid is in a Lionel Messi scenario. Statistics are not the thing for him. Were he to retire today, he’d be a hall of famer.
Actually, were he to retire today, his mystique would be massively amplified. It’d be a tantalizing series of what might have beens. ‘Connor McDavid’ and ‘mysterious’ are not two ideas that currently co-exist.
All that’s missing on his ‘best ever’ résumé is a win. Any sort. One Cup won’t put him anywhere near the front of that conversation, but it will get him into it.
Messi got the final stamp on his forms when he was 35, right at the end of the application window. If he hadn’t won that World Cup with Argentina in Qatar, all those goals over all those years in all those championship seasons would not have mattered. At a certain level, you can’t blame the draft or the GM or the salary cap. It was on you and you failed.
McDavid is in that window, and probably not for long.
The Oilers will never have this sort of season again – one in which they start out looking like a flaming paper bag left on your doorstep, and end up playing like they were all raised together in some sort of Soviet-era military program.
This is as close as any roster featuring McDavid and Draisaitl is going to get to looking balanced. Even Edmonton’s permanent goalie problem has been temporarily neutralized.
The Oilers are always one awkward hit from disaster. There are already rumours milling that McDavid is playing injured.
For right now, the journey has been choppy, but not turbulent. Dallas is probably the best all-round team left in the playoffs. If the Oilers can do this, well, you know. You shouldn’t say it, but you can think it.
Which of course leads you to start thinking about other alternate futures. What about one in which McDavid gets his Cup and follows that up with a gold medal in Milan.
There is a world in which, over the course of 20 months, McDavid goes from the star who couldn’t shoot straight to elbowing on the all-time list with Mark Messier and Guy Lafleur.
Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe are already out of reach. At McDavid’s age, Gretzky already had six Cups – four Stanleys and two Canadas. But you never know. It’s not as though the NHL is choc-a-bloc with potential dynasties. If McDavid finally learns how to win, he might not stop.
Just talking this way is a jinx. The Oilers are one bad night of sleep for goalie Stuart Skinner away from dropping four in a row.
But this is also why things never turn out for Canadians in the NHL. The country’s so tight on the stick that people won’t play the what-could-be game.
It doesn’t require a trick of fate or a perfect world for Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers to come good. All it requires is that the people who shouldn’t miss don’t.