Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers has been making history since he first joined the NHL just over a decade ago. Now, he’s hit another rare milestone that hasn’t been done in over two decades.
On Monday night, McDavid scored the opening goal, his 11th of the season, in the Oilers’ contest against the New York Rangers which saw him extend his season-opening point streak to 19 games, pushing him past Bill Cowley and Marcel Dionne’s 18-game mark according to the NHL’s Records site.
Rare Company
The most recent player who have a 19-game point streak to start a season was then Ottawa Senators forward Dany Heatley during the 2005-06 season. Heatley’s streak ran for 22 games, earning him the fifth-longest streak in NHL history, just one behind Wayne Gretzky’s figure from the 1988-89 season.
There have only been three times that a player has had a 30+ game point streak to start a season. Mats Sundin (1992-93) and Wayne Gretzky (1982-83) each had their streak come to an end after exactly 30 games, but the overall record also belongs to Gretzky, who scored a point in 51 straight games to start the 1983-84 season. For context, that streak ran from the beginning of October all the way until the end of January.
A Start to Remember
Connor McDavid always plays at a high level, there’s a reason that he’s a six-time Art Ross Trophy winner and a three-time Hart Trophy winner. With that being said, he’s playing at a level that we haven’t seen in the NHL for quite a long time. If he continues playing at the same pace, he’ll blow his prior career-highs out of the water, though that’s much easier said than done.
As things currently stand, McDavid has 48 points in his first 19 games of the season which puts him on pace to become just the second player in NHL history to record more than 200 points in a season, which has only been accomplished by Wayne Gretzky to this point in history. Scoring at the same rate, he’d finish the season with 212 points in the NHL’s new 84-game format. It’s unlikely that he’ll do so, as it’s an almost impossible task in the modern NHL, but he could certainly surpass his prior career-high of 153 points in the 2022-23 season.
Team Success
Of course McDavid’s strong performance, along with Leon Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard having incredible starts of their own, has also led to team success during Mike Babcock’s first season behind the Oilers’ bench. As things currently stand, the Oilers sit second in the NHL with 29 points of a possible 38 through their first 19 games.
Whether McDavid can continue playing at a superhuman pace remains to be seen, but it’s clear that he’s committed to continuously improving and doing whatever it’ll take to win a Stanley Cup. Now, he’ll just have to show that he can once again carry this same energy in April, and more importantly, he’ll have to find a way to get his teammates to continue playing at a high level.
At 29 years of age, it oddly seems like we still haven’t seen the best of Connor McDavid.
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Oilers Superstar’s Latest Milestone Puts Him in Legendary Company