Connor McDavid won’t be the only Edmonton Oilers player wearing a captain’s letter on his sweater in the Four Nations Face-Off next month.
Defenceman Mattias Ekholm has also been named an alternate captain when he suits up with Team Sweden in Montreal and Boston, running from Feb. 12-20.
McDavid is an alternate for Team Canada, along with defenceman Cale Makar, with Sidney Crosby named captain.
“It should be Sid, for sure,” McDavid said when the roster was announced back in late October. “That’s not even a question.”
While Crosby has won a pair of Olympic golds with Team Canada — in Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014 — McDavid will be donning the maple leaf on the biggest stage of his career. He previously played for Canada in the 2018 world hockey championship in Denmark and for Team North America in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.
Ekholm, meanwhile, is an alternate captain on Team Sweden along with William Nylander of the Toronto Maple Leafs, while the captain’s C goes to Tampa Bay Lightning defenceman Victor Hedman.
“Me, Erik and Victor are the same birth year and we came up in the same national team, so I’ve known them for pretty much half my life, if not more,” Ekholm said. “It’s fun to see that we’re still going strong and we can be part of something like that, it’s pretty cool.
“They play in a different conference than we do, so I don’t see them that much, but whenever you bump into them on the road, you try to say hi and see how thing are. But it’ll be more now that we’re going into the tournament and knowing what’s coming next year (with the Olympics). It’s exciting times and hopefully we can do something good.”
Ekholm has represented his country at five world hockey championships, as well as the 2016 World Cup. He has a pair of medals on his resume, bronze in 2014 and gold in 2018.
“Obviously, it’s a huge honour,” Ekholm said. “Victor is a great leader and it was kind of a no-brainer for me that he was going to be the captain and I can just speak for myself and it’s a tremendous honour to be an assistant captain, obviously, for your country.
“I’m going to do everything possible and everything I can do to make the team as good as possible and hopefully we can make some noise.”
Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch said Ekholm receiving a letter would have been obvious, in his mind.
“He’s definitely one of the leaders in our room. We’re the oldest team in the NHL and we have a lot of veterans. He doesn’t wear a letter on our team, but he’s definitely a leader,” Knoblauch said. “Our guys have a lot of respect for him in the person that he is, the work that he puts in and obviously you see it every night what he does on the ice, whether it’s playing against other teams’ top lines, blocking shots, on the penalty kill. He does so much, so I’m not surprised they would announce he’d be one of their captains.
“A lot of the respect he gets is what a quality player he is, he does everything. He is hard to play against, he is very physical and a lot of respect around the league is because he’s not dirty at all. He’s physical but he doesn’t take any liberty on guys that are unfair and difficult to play against.”
And as for consistency, Ekholm leads the NHL with a plus-minus rating of 92 since joining the Oilers on March 1, 2023.
“We see it every night, every game, every day that we have him around and when other teams come in, they only see him once or twice or maybe three times a year,” Knoblauch said. “But it’s hard not to notice Ekholm.”
Both McDavid and Ekholm also were named to the Oilers Quarter-Century Team on Thursday.
In and out
Another Swedish player, John Klingberg, was in the lineup to make his Oilers debut Thursday.
The 32-year-old native of Gothenburg, Sweden, had five points in 14 games playing with the Toronto Maple Leafs last season before being sidelined by hip surgery.
And not for the first time in his career, either.
“I had two hip surgeries before I got to the League,” said Klingberg, who had operations at ages 18 and 21. “Now it’s just a matter of proving it’s ready to go.
“I’m excited to play. What’s it been, 440 days?”
Between games, maybe, but Klingberg had been skating with the Brampton Steelheads of the Ontario Hockey League prior to signing with Edmonton on Jan. 17.
“Obviously, the work load with him coming in is not going to be a 25-minute night for him,” Knoblauch said. “He’ll probably see numerous partners throughout the night.”
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge