Connor McDavid: Edmonton’s False Hope

Connor McDavid: Edmonton’s False Hope

Connor McDavid: Edmonton’s False Hope

Connor McDavid was being touted as, alternately, the next Wayne Gretzky and the next Sidney Crosby prior to the NHL entry draft in the summer of 2015. It seems unfortunately fitting, given the comparison to Crosby—whose career thus far has been repeatedly sidetracked by injury—that McDavid should miss significant on-ice time so early in his first season. In the first 13 games of the 2015-16 season, the rookie forward was admirably living up to his hype, scoring 7 goals and 5 assists for the Edmonton Oilers before an injury to his collarbone on November 3, 2015, sidelined him for at least a month. For Oilers fans, this pattern—hopes buoyed by a high draft pick, then systematically dashed by misfortune and poor performance—has become unfortunately familiar.

A Decade of High Picks and Low Standings

Before drafting Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers had not had a winning season since 2007-08. From 2010 to 2015, they finished no higher than 24th in the league, ended up dead last twice, and selected first overall in the NHL entry draft four times, signing forwards Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Nail Yakupov with their previous first picks. Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, and Yakupov scored a combined 52 goals and 127 points over the course of the 2014-15 season—not nearly enough to get the Oilers into playoff contention, though just enough to prevent them from ending up the worst team in the West.

How Other Rebuilding Teams Turned It Around

All NHL teams go through the occasional rough patch. There’s a reason the lottery favors those with the worst records; the influx of young talent has given many an NHL club the boost it needs to climb back up the standings after a particularly crushing season. The Pittsburgh Penguins missed the playoffs for four consecutive years before they drafted Sidney Crosby in the 2005 NHL entry draft. They were back in the playoffs for the 2006-07 season and won a Stanley Cup in 2009. The New York Islanders drafted John Tavares first overall in 2009 and reached the postseason in both 2012-13 and 2014-15. Given their continued poor record and high draft picks, it’s safe to say the Oilers experienced no similar upswing from drafting Taylor Hall in 2010, though he scored 22 goals and 42 points in his rookie season. In the 13 games Connor McDavid played before being injured in the 2015-16 season, the Oilers went 5-8-0. Even though McDavid was producing nearly a point a game—as good a performance as any team could expect from a rookie—the Oilers weren’t exactly tearing up the leaderboards.

The Real Problem: A Broken Blue Line and a Revolving Door in Goal

While the Oilers have used their high draft picks to nab some promising young scoring talent, they haven’t been nearly as fastidious about finding quality defensemen to bring up through their system, and this, more than any other single factor, could be pointed to as the cause of their habitually poor performance. Between 2001 and 2015, the Oilers either received or traded for 18 total first-round picks. Only three of these picks were used on defensemen, and of those, only Oscar Klefbom, drafted in 2011, played significant minutes in the 2014-15 season. Since it’s rare for NHL teams to trade top-pairing defensemen—or even allow their contracts to reach free agency—the lack of attention to bringing young defensemen into the system in the early 2000s will continue to haunt the Oilers in the seasons to come. As of the 2015 draft, the Oilers had not had a positive goal differential since the 2005-06 season, and their cumulative goal differential in the 15-year span from 2001-2015 is a staggering -375 (an average of -29 per season). More young scorers will do nothing to solve this defensive problem. Good goaltending might, but Edmonton has used no fewer than 19 goaltenders in that same 15-year span, none of whom have stayed with the team for longer than five seasons, and only three of whom have played 40 or more games in consecutive seasons (Nikolai Khabibulin from 2010-2012, Dwayne Roloson from 2005-2008, and Tommy Salo from 2001-2004).

Though Connor McDavid required surgery for his fractured clavicle, he is expected to be back in the lineup before the end of 2015. Most Oilers fans are grateful the injury wasn’t worse; others likely realize it doesn’t matter how long McDavid is out. The problems keeping the team so consistently low in the standings are more than any one player—even if he is the next Wayne Gretzky—can be expected to fix on his own.