Connor McDavid needs to be better.
That’s something you’ll hear about once every 10 years and that once is right now.
You have to account for fatigue, for the emotional letdown after an earth-shaking Four Nations Face-Off and for the fact his teammates are all skating in a fog right now, but if this isn’t the toughest stretch of hockey in McDavid’s career it can’t be far from it.
In the last five games he has zero goals, three assists and is a staggering, team worst minus 12 (minus two against Chicago, minus three against Colorado, minus three against Philadelphia, minus three against Washington and minus one against Tampa Bay).
A player’s goal differential, like all analytics, is always a by-product of the five guys on the ice, not any one player. You are at the mercy of someone else’s mistakes and your stats can be padded by someone else’s effort. So that dash-12 isn’t entirely on McDavid.
The wraparound goal Tuesday night in Tampa Bay, for instance, that Stuart Skinner somehow didn’t see coming from a mile away and Evan Bouchard made no effort to stop had nothing to do with McDavid.
But, as the old saying goes, it might not be his fault, but it’s his problem. When the best player in the world, the heart and soul of a hockey team, is being outscored that badly at even strength something needs to change.
In fact, McDavid hasn’t quite been McDavid for a while now. That extra level that nobody else can get to, that one that brings an entire building out of its seat, hasn’t been there.
In the last 18 starts he has just four multi-point games and 19 points in total. In the 18 games before that: 10 multi-point games and 33 points in total.
Something is off. Among all of the things head coach Kris Knoblauch needs to figure out and fix about this lifeless team right now, this is at the top of the list.
CHANGE IS BAD
Maybe it’s time to stop saying this is the same team that went to the Final last year, so they are obviously going to figure this out.
It’s not the same team at all.
There’s been an almost 40 per cent turnover since last June, with Dylan Holloway, Cody Ceci, Warren Foegele, Ryan McLeod, Vincent Desharnais, Philip Broberg and Evander Kane out of the picture.
They’ve been replaced by Viktor Arvidsson, Jeff Skinner, Vasily Podkolzin, Kasperi Kapanen up front and Ty Emberson, Troy Stecher and John Klingberg on the blue line.
That’s a pretty significant downgrade. Not only did Foegele, McLeod and Holloway provide the speed this team desperately needs, they’ve combined for 46 goals in Los Angeles, Buffalo and St. Louis this year. Desharnais and Ceci were stalwarts on a penalty kill that was first in the league at 98.6 per cent in last year’s playoffs.
It now sits 27th in the NHL.
General manager Stan Bowman has his work cut out for him in advance of the trade deadline. He had a team that was two goals away from a Stanley Cup last June and now it looks lost, weak and full of holes.
Skinner and Arvidsson look like big mistakes, his bottom six lacks any sort of identity and they don’t have enough elite forwards to round out a legitimate top six.
And we haven’t even touched on the spotty goaltending.
BRIDGE DEAL FOR BOUCH
Unless he comes to life sometime soon and turns back into the superstar we saw last spring, Evan Bouchard is playing his way into a bridge contract.
A long-term deal in the $10 million range was up for grabs when the season began, all he had to do is pick up where he left off last year. Instead, he’s looking a lot like he did before Mattias Ekholm arrived in Edmonton at the 2023 trade deadline and shifted Bouchard’s career into another gear.
His lack of intensity, confidence and situational awareness, conditions that seems to be getting worse, not better, are no small part of why the Oilers are stuck in this troubling malaise.
Offensively, 45 points is very good, not great (there are 16 defencemen in the group between 35 and 48 points and most of them don’t play with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl) and in 190 minutes of power play time this season, second only to Draisaitl on the Oilers, he has zero goals.
So you have to figure he’s back in wait and see territory — a shorter bridge deal for less money while the Oilers find out for sure what they have in him.
If he returns to form and outperforms his contract during that time and commands a massive payday when he becomes an unrestricted free agent, good. That means the team got three great years out of a superstar defenceman on a value deal in the middle of its Stanley Cup window.
If not, they will have dodged a bullet.
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