EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) — Connor McDavid was surrounded by great people.
His hair still wet from practice, he was sitting in Studio 99, a restaurant in the Edmonton Oilers' home arena named for Wayne Gretzky and filled with memorabilia from the Great Man's legendary career. To his right was the jersey Gretzky wore in his first NHL season, and on the wall to his left was a quote from the No. 99 who led Edmonton to four Stanley Cups.
If McDavid continues this way, the Oilers will have to make room for Studio 97.
Following in the footsteps of the world's greatest ice hockey player behind Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby, McDavid led his team from near elimination to the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Final to a Game 6 victory on home ice on Friday night. The only player in league history to trail by four points in two consecutive games in the Finals, the Oilers captain will get another chance to add another chapter to his legend by taking the series to a deciding Game 7 on the other side of the continent.
“I've worked my whole life to get to this position,” McDavid said Thursday. “I think it's going to feel magical when I get here. Magic, I don't know. You never know what's going to happen. It's all been pretty normal, to be honest with you. It's always been part of the plan for our team to be in this position, at home, playing a big game in a big moment, and tomorrow night is no different.”
The game, played in front of a sellout crowd of more than 18,000, was just another game. Many more in this city of nearly 1 million people expected to descend downtown to witness a game that hasn't been played in nearly 80 years. Detroit, in 1945, was the last team to reach Game 7 in the Finals after losing 3-0; Toronto, three years earlier, was the only team to make a complete comeback.
Edmonton can dream of that possibility now thanks to McDavid, who has 42 points in this playoff season, just five shy of the record set by Gretzky in 1985. Even if the Oilers are eliminated and the Panthers win the Cup for the first time in franchise history, McDavid has emerged as the favorite to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
“He's a recklessly good player, and that's a very unique quality,” Hall of Famer Ken Hitchcock, who coached McDavid in 2018-19, told The Associated Press by phone. “He's not afraid to put his body in dangerous areas to score, and he's really hard to guard against. He goes to the net and takes hits to make plays. There's no fear in the way he plays. Absolutely not.”
Panthers coach Paul Maurice warned anyone who would listen before the series began that McDavid's greatness is so constant that it's easy to take it for granted. McDavid hasn't scored many goals in these playoffs or this title series, but his impact has been outsized.
“These things happen, and when you have a really good player like Connor McDavid going off the floor for stretches of time, it feels like something's wrong,” Maurice said. “But it's not. Nobody, not even Connor McDavid, has scored more than 82 points in his last three games or more than 700 points in every playoff game. That's just how it is.”
McDavid may be looking to shake things up after scoring three goals and eight assists for 11 points in Games 2-5 of the Finals despite facing his toughest defensive matchup against Aleksander Barkov, who captained Florida to victory this season as the team's best defensive forward and helped carry the Panthers to their final stretch by shutting down Boston's David Pastrnak and New York's Artemi Panarin early in the playoffs.
Performing at his best when the pressure is at its highest is nothing new for McDavid: Nearly a decade ago, he was the Ontario Hockey League playoff leading scorer a few months after being named MVP of the world junior championships and led Canada to a gold medal in the Toronto building where he grew up watching games as a fan.
Chris Knobloch, who took over after the Oilers got off to a terrible start, finishing 31st out of 31 teams in the league, knows McDavid well from their time together with the OHL's Erie Otters, and believes that such a love of baseball is part of the three-time MVP's ability to shine when the spotlight is strongest.
“I don't think you can excel at anything unless you truly love what you're doing, and he loves hockey,” Knobloch said. “He's also a very competitive guy. He wants to win and he wants to be the best, so I think his love and his passion is what allows him to step up and make those plays when it matters.”
Those plays made McDavid a hero in Edmonton, where the No. 97 jersey is more common than Tim Hortons coffee shops. Asked to explain the furore, defenceman Mattias Ekholm likened McDavid to Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
“He's our Zlatan,” Ekholm said in Swedish, “and he's just as big, but a totally different type of person. Zlatan was outgoing, a bit cocky and confident in front of others. Connor is more reserved in that respect, but on the field (or on the rink) they are the same type of player who can dominate and totally dominate the whole game.”
“He couldn't be bigger. I don't know how big Gretzky was when he played here, but I think it was similar. He really deserves that honor, especially with what he did in the really big games.”
It's been 17 years since he won a Stanley Cup with Anaheim, and the team is on the brink of losing its third finals in four appearances since 2020, but veteran winger Corey Perry likened McDavid's leadership to that of Scott Niedermayer, who was the Ducks captain when they won the championship in 2007. They need two more wins to follow Niedermayer's path to the Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy, but if anyone can do it, it's McDavid.
“He lets his play speak for itself,” Perry said. “What Connor does is he puts the team on his back and leads by example. He's on a mission and we're following him.”
