As the team's best player, Connor McDavid has the ability to squash a team move he may not like. That hasn't happened with the hiring of Mike Babcock or the signing of Alex Formenton, Cathal Kelly writes.Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
This week, the Edmonton Oilers signed Alex Formenton, one of five men acquitted in the Hockey Canada sex assault trial.
Formenton is no star and never was. He’s spent last year playing in the Swiss league, which is one rung down from the NHL, if you pulled off all the other rungs between the top and bottom of the ladder. All to say that PR-wise, this is a choice. Selling it to Oilers fans requires a nod from the man who runs Edmonton.
“Listen, I think he’s gone through a process,” Connor McDavid said at one of the league’s pre-season petting zoos. “He’s been transparent through the process, and that process has led him here today, and it’s a great opportunity for him.”
There’s the nod. McDavid has put an arm of protection around Formenton. Anyone who wants to rustle up a morality mob is going to have to go through the captain. Since the captain has only two years left on his deal, no one in Edmonton – or Canadian hockey, full stop – is inclined to take him on. It’s one thing for Americans to leave. It will be quite another when Captain Canuck decides to move to Florida.
By vouching for Formenton, as well as new head coach Mike Babcock, McDavid is doing more than fronting the crest. He’s taking his mid-career heel turn.
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You sort of get it. McDavid will turn 30 in a few months, and what’s he got to show for being a nice guy? Steady disappointment while running a club that can’t keep up with him, even when he holds its hand. If he hasn’t already, McDavid should check out Amadeus. Ten years ago, he was Mozart. Today, he’s in real danger of becoming Salieri.
Every NHLer is a winner in the sense that they get paid a tech CEO’s wage to run around in pants that make a noise when the legs rub together, but even on that metric McDavid is now losing.
Ducks jackpot winner Leo Carlsson has scored as many points in his career as McDavid scored last season, and yet will make 50 per cent more than the great man this year. All of a sudden, and very relatively speaking, McDavid might be the most underpaid athlete in team sport.
The whole point of McDavid taking a below-market deal was so that the Oilers could get much better, while they appear to have stayed mostly the same. Shunting a grinder like Formenton in at the last minute, knowing how it would go over, feels desperate. So, yeah, were I McDavid, I’d be a little put out, too.
McDavid has vouched for the Oilers' recent signing of Formenton, one of the five players from the 2018 Canadian world junior team who were acquitted of sexual assault charges last year.Geoff Robins/The Canadian Press
We have assumed to this point that McDavid is working on the side of light – mostly because he came off the same assembly line as Sidney Crosby. Quiet guy. Shy smile. Would make a good next-door neighbour.
The difference between the two men is that Crosby won early and often – Stanley Cups and gold medals. The Nova Scotian can afford to stay nice.
Circumstances are forcing McDavid to abandon that position. I’m sure he’d still make a good neighbour, but we also know that when he goes to work, he’s capable of extreme cynicism. That gambling ad featuring McDavid as a sort of shaman guiding us all toward bankruptcy – “Maybe you should mullet over” – was an early warning signal.
Everyone’s always wondered if McDavid is a killer when it counts. He’s never managed it on the ice. Maybe he needed to warm up to it in the off-season.
Whatever the case, the Oilers are now clearly the black hats of the NHL. Who won’t they sign? What won’t they do? Nobody and nothing, it appears. McDavid’s personal gravity is what makes that possible. There is an implied ‘You don’t like it? Then maybe he’ll leave’ behind every decision.
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It’s been a while since hockey had a team of proper bad guys. It went out of fashion with fighting. The Golden Knights have tried, but come on. Once you get south of the snow belt, nobody is ever going to truly rate you.
The Oilers are the original good guys. Back in the day, even their bad guys were charming. Now they’re the seventies Flyers, but with more investigative reporting to provide the villainous foundation.
One wonders what happens when Babcock starts playing head games with players he doesn’t rate. Obviously, McDavid won’t be one of them. But if it happens, what’s the captain’s role in that? Does he have one? McDavid vouched for the man in charge, because he’s the actual person in charge. Does that means he endorses all of Babcock’s tactics?
“I think that what obviously we see is a great opportunity to be coached by someone who’s coached in every single big game there is to coach in, who’s been successful, won Cups, gold medals,” McDavid said of Babcock this week.
McDavid vouched for the Oilers' hiring of coach Babcock, who was let go by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2019, then hired and fired by the Columbus Blue Jackets in the 2023 off-season, before coaching a game for the team.James Maclennan/The Canadian Press
That sounds like Al Davis logic – ‘I don’t care what he’s done or what he does, as long as it works.’
Go into the losing locker room right after an elimination game, and the mood is devastated. Go in there a couple of days later for the clearout, and it’s turned into poorly concealed excitement. It’s the last day of school and the kids will soon be free.
But some guys won’t accept that not everyone gets to win. Once they’ve stacked more cash than they can spend, some don’t care about anything but that. And not in the heroic, I’ll-work-out-for-12-hours-on-my-birthday sort of way. More in the I-will-go-to-any-lengths-to-get-what-I-want way.
This summer, McDavid reached that point. If he hears that Count Dracula did miracles with the Romanian national team, he’ll mention that to the GM. So what if a few equipment guys end up disappearing?
In the canned quote world of pro sports, it’s refreshing to see someone snap in this way. It doesn’t feel good, but it feels honest.
Now it will go one of two ways. In one possible future, the Oilers win a championship, McDavid’s ruthlessness is vindicated and suddenly pitilessness is back in vogue. In the other, they don’t, McDavid goes Cup-hunting elsewhere and everyone blames the Oilers for failing him.
Either way, none of this attaches itself to the guy who made it happen.