Edmonton Oilers' star Connor McDavid looks on in disbelief as his team falls in overtime and into a 3-1 series deficit against the Anaheim Ducks.Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
For a few years now, the Edmonton Oilers have had a simple approach to the playoffs – Connor McDavid scores and/or creates more goals than whatever team they’re playing against.
Other teams worry about matching lines, or getting scrappy performances from their bottom six. Not Edmonton. They could stick a bunch of chimpanzees in orange PJs beside McDavid, and he’d bounce pucks in off their backs.
This year, they’re trying a new approach: team-oriented hockey. It’s not going so well.
The Oilers can still score goals. It’s that they let in even more, especially when they’re in the lead.
Now down 3-1 to the Anaheim Ducks, Edmonton is too explosive an outfit to be truly out of it.
Cathal Kelly: McDavid's legacy under the microscope as Oilers renew Stanley Cup quest
But then the camera flashes to McDavid on the bench between shifts, staring into the middle distance like he’s trying to figure out if he’s trapped in the Heated Rivalry episode of Black Mirror and you think, ‘Maybe not this time.’
It is possible the Edmonton braintrust has some big ideas about how to switch things up mid-series.
“We have to change the way we’re playing a little bit,” Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said Monday. “But also trying not to make the mistakes at crucial times.”
So let’s put a pin in new ideas for now and circle back on that later.
The Oilers did everything they could to try to keep Ryan Poehling's shot from trickling across the goal line in Sunday night's overtime game, but they didn't get there in time.Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
Knoblauch can’t say what’s obvious – that, yes, the defence is non-existent, and, sure, none of the goalies are any good, and, yeah, it would have been a good idea to think about such things earlier, but this is on McDavid. It’s always been on him. If he wants to succeed in Edmonton, his baseline is doing it by himself two nights out of three.
Oilers fans like it this way because having the best player in hockey on their team feels great. The Oilers like it because it makes them so much money. The only person not getting what they want out of the McDavid-centric model is McDavid.
Teams that intend on winning are moving off the one-big-star model, not because it can’t work, but because that path is so narrow.
Who’s the oxygen-eating star on Carolina? Or Dallas? Or even Colorado, since they have so many?
Tampa has Nikita Kucherov, but if Montreal could bundle one Lightning player into a car trunk and park him somewhere for a week, I’m guessing it would be Brandon Hagel.
In Philadelphia, they’re creating a cult of personality around Porter Martone, who nobody outside Pennsylvania had heard of before last week, while Sidney Crosby’s ride into the NHL sunset is becoming more of a long shuffle.
Brand-name stars sell jerseys. They fill arenas. They get people who don’t care about hockey hot for the game.
They also suck up too much of the cap, warp roster construction and, as we’re seeing in Toronto, get too much say in how things are done.
One overwhelming star is good for your business, and bad for your hockey.
Facing a first-round exit, McDavid could look at his options after another season ends without him lifting the Stanley Cup, but he won't do that, Cathal Kelly writes.Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
The irony here is that McDavid probably doesn’t want to be that kind of star. If someone on the Leafs told Auston Matthews that Toronto was more likely to win a Cup if he agreed to play 10 minutes a night on the fourth line, you feel fairly sure he would say, ‘I don’t remember what you do here, but we’re going to have to let you go.’
McDavid would take that deal. He’d play in net if that meant the Oilers were more likely to win. He knows the score. That he may be the most gifted individual ever to put on pads and all that talent is at serious risk of ending in tears.
The smart play would be looking for the exit. If getting Ole’d in the first round by the Ducks doesn’t convince him, nothing will.
For the Oilers’ part, they would fix this if they could, but they can’t, so they won’t. You can’t take a mediocre team plus a couple of great players and make it good next year by wishing it so. You have to tear down to rebuild, and Edmonton doesn’t have the time.
So it’ll be a quickie reno – zinc countertops and a cheap jacuzzi – and then more of the same. Their only hope next year is the same hope they had this year – that come April, McDavid has an ’S’ on his chest, as well as the ‘C’.
In the interim, McDavid is in charge of his coming and going. He’s under contract for two more years, but the moment he tells an Elliotte Friedman that he wants out, Edmonton would have no choice. That market would collapse in on itself under the media circus that would follow a McDavid ultimatum.
Plus, every other team in the league would be lining up to give you whatever you want for him. The Rangers would give them a first-round pick, every year, forever. Toronto would give them Mississauga.
If you squint, there is a winner to be built around Leon Draisaitl – a non-overwhelming star. Maybe the McDavid haul would be enough to buy it.
But McDavid won’t do that. He’s too Canadian. He lacks the razzle-dazzle gene.
You already know what will happen. McDavid will serve out his two years. It won’t get any better. Then he’ll leave for a contender, but the magic will be gone.
The great ones – Orr, Richard, Lemieux, et al – won with who brung ‘em. They didn’t have to gerrymander a championship by parachuting in to a safe seat. Even if he wins a title in, say, Florida, McDavid won’t get the sort of career glow up he’s hoping for. By that point, he’s a guy who chased Cups, rather than the other legends who drew them magnetically.
This calendar year, 2025-26, should have been the annus mirabilis of McDavid’s career. Instead, it’s turning into the beginning of the end. What a shame for him, and what a fumble by hockey.