Edmonton Oilers' Connor McDavid (97) looks for the rebound as Winnipeg Jets goaltender Connor Hellebuyck (37) saves the shot during second period NHL action in Winnipeg on April 28, 2021. In Game 1 of the first round playoff matchup between the Oilers and Jets on May 19, Tucker Poolman (3) opened the scoring for Winnipeg while McDavid was held scoreless in the Jets' 4-1 win.The Canadian Press
Mathieu Perreault said the secret to victory was in throwing up speed bumps through the neutral zone.
The energetic little Winnipeg Jets forward was just one of multiple bumps – up the middle, down the side, in the corners, in the crease – that the Jets used to essentially take Connor McDavid out of the game he has been said to own.
This, on the very day in which the NHL recognized the Edmonton Oilers captain with the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading scorer, with more trophies surely to follow.
In a game in which players you never heard of scored key goals – surprising themselves as much as their teammates – McDavid had neither a goal nor an assist and finished with a mere two shots on net.
The league’s second-leading scorer, McDavid’s teammate Leon Draisaitl, didn’t fare much better, counting four shots but no points in Edmonton’s 4-1 loss to Winnipeg in Wednesday’s opening game of their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series.
Maybe the stars will shine in Game 2 of the Jets-Oilers series, but this was a night for the unknown
McDavid’s next trophy, almost assuredly, will be the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player, an honour that last season went to Draisaitl.
MVPs in the season, MIA in the opening match of the playoffs.
There is much speculation that Oilers head coach Dave Tippett will turn to what local media call his “Nuclear Option” – pairing McDavid and Draisaitl together on the same line, something that has produced wonders in the past.
Tippett, however, was not tipping his hand in the Oilers’ Thursday Zoom presser.
“We’ll see where we’re at with that,” he said. “We’ll talk it over with the staff.”
In other words, look for it.
The actual MVPs of Game 1 were a goaltender, the Jets’ Connor Hellebuyck – who has his own NHL trophy in last year’s Vézina as the league’s top netminder – and three ultimate journeymen: Winnipeg defencemen Tucker Poolman and Logan Stanley, as well as little-used forward Dominic Toninato.
Hellebuyck was brilliant, especially in crease scrums and when he was being screened. Poolman and Toninato scored their first goals of the year. Toninato, who got COVID-19 in the late fall and had trouble making the roster, tipped a Stanley shot from the blueline, though no one, including the on-ice officials, knew it had gone in until they went to video review.
Winnipeg head coach Paul Maurice admitted he wasn’t even going to play Toninato, but the other coaches talked him into it.
“They pushed hard for it and they were right,” Maurice said. “He scored the game-winning goal.”
It was not a typical Edmonton game, in which McDavid and Draisaitl invariably provide some highlight-reel rushes and plays. It was close-checking, sloppy at first and ever grinding.
“That’s just playoff hockey,” Maurice said.
McDavid never found his stride. He didn’t even record a shot on net until four minutes into the third period. On one of his patented sweeps around a backtracking defender, he slipped and went down. It was not a good look. If he didn’t have Jets defenceman Neal Pionk giving him a facewash, it was Adam Lowry sticking to him or, often, Winnipeg’s best player, Mark Scheifele, moving lockstep with him stride for stride.
The perfect defender against McDavid, Lowry told reporters with a laugh, would be “someone that can skate as fast as him.” There is simply no one who can burst over the blueline with quite the speed and finesse as the player who somehow managed to score 105 points in this shrunken 56-game season.
And yet, Wednesday night at Rogers Place, there was nothing. Game 2 goes Friday evening in Edmonton. The Oilers remain heavy favourites to take the series despite being down a game.
Tippett was asked about the long-standing theory that if you shut down his two superstars you win the game.
“Game 1 was a low-event game,” he countered. “The big guys on either team – they didn’t contribute other than the empty-net goals [by Jets forwards Kyle Connor and Blake Wheeler]. That’s playoff-style hockey. The grinders and checkers have to help on the scoreboard, too.”
Maurice claimed Thursday that his message won’t be changing in terms of the game he wants his team to play – but it won’t be against the same Oilers who fell Wednesday.
“The team that wins Game 1 is coming to the rink feeling really good,” he said. “The team that loses Game 1 has an even greater sense of focus, and they have, in some ways, an advantage in that.
“We wouldn’t change [the] message, but we have to be aware that this game will be quite a bit faster tomorrow … I think tomorrow is going to be very, very fast.”
And speed, of course, is Connor McDavid’s main weapon.
With McDavid’s play virtually all the media was talking about, the Oilers elected not to make him available in the Zoom scrum.
The presumption being that he will answer all questions on the ice.
Special to The Globe and Mail