Connor McDavid reacts after scoring a short-handed goal against the Vegas Golden Knights in the first period on Feb. 6 in Las Vegas.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
It has been quite a run for Connor McDavid and, with him, the Oilers.
A week ago the superstar centre won the NHL all-star skills contest and pocketed US$1-million. Even for him, that’s a fair chunk of change for two hours of work.
On Tuesday Edmonton lost for the first time in two months, missing the chance of tying the league record of 17 successive victories.
McDavid, naturally, scored his team’s lone goal in the 3-1 defeat by the Golden Knights in Las Vegas.
“When you win 16 straight there are a lot of things that go right and you get some bounces,” McDavid said. “For the most part I thought we earned them.
“It has been a while since we lost and sometimes you forget how bad you hate losing. It’s a good reminder. It’s disappointing, but we move on.”
Ho-hum.
At one point the Oilers were 3-10-1 and behind everybody in the standings but the San Jose Sharks. Since then they have gone 26-6 and are third in the Pacific Division with a game on Friday in Anaheim, Calif.
After a slow start related to an undisclosed injury, Edmonton’s captain has turned things around. He is in the midst of an 11-game streak during which he has scored eight goals and accumulated 22 points. Those numbers would seem gaudy for most everyone else but not so much for him after a historic 153-point season in 2022-23.
This is the third consecutive year in which the Oilers were reeling and on the cusp of falling out of contention for the playoffs only to rebound. The difference this season was that many experts predicted they would at least reach the Stanley Cup final if not win their first since 1990.
“As you could expect, it was very challenging and frustrating,” McDavid said by phone last week. “We expected to be a very good team. I just hoped that the hole we had dug wasn’t going to be too deep.
“Our group has always been kind of weird. We reach rock bottom and then have to go on a run to get back into the picture.”
A year ago Edmonton started fine and then hit a choppy patch where it went 14-18 before it righted itself.
“The stretch we had in the second half was similar to what has been going on now,” McDavid said. “Last year we were a borderline playoff team and then we took off.”
McDavid has 21 goals and 68 points through 44 games. That’s a bit below his pace from last year and it would take a huge push for him to win his sixth Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s points leader. He is 18 behind Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov. (Enter Leafs fans here to boo.)
The Oilers have more balance now than in many a moon. Zach Hyman leads the team with 30 goals, Stuart Skinner seems to have found another level in the net and the rising defenceman Evan Bouchard is scoring at nearly a point-per-game rate.
Edmonton has climbed out of its funk and McDavid is enjoying the good life. He and his fiancée Lauren Kyle are busy planning a summer wedding – okay, maybe Lauren is more busy at it than him – and he just signed a multiyear agreement to be an ambassador for Bodyarmor. The coconut-water-based sports drink just became available in Canada for the first time earlier this month.
“It’s a natural fit,” McDavid said. “I love the product and am very conscious about what I put in my body. There has never been a time where my health has been more in forefront.”
With the second half of the season ahead, McDavid and the Oilers are where they want to be.
“At the beginning of the season a lot of things went wrong,” he said. “There was a sense of anxiety in the room but there always an underlying belief that wasn’t shaken.
“We needed to have a stretch to get ourselves back into it and we’ve done that.”