Something’s up with the Oilers captain.
Connor McDavid hasn’t been himself as of late. His game looks off and his numbers only amplify the point.
It’s been a stretch of eight ugly games for No. 97 dating back to his return from cross-check on Conor Garland that landed him a three-game suspension. He’s scored two goals and seven points in those games, which is fine production for the overwhelming majority of players in the league, but not for the man who scored the Golden Goal.
The eight games are split with six coming before the 4 Nations Face-Off, where McDavid scored three goals and five points, and two games since. With him on the ice at five-on-five, the Oilers have been outscored 12-3. Once again, the Oilers have been outscored 12-3.
Much of that damage came in the last two games over the weekend, wherein the Oilers were outscored 4-0 with McDavid on the ice. It’s clear something isn’t right, and as such, he was absent from the team’s Monday practice.
Undoubtedly, it’s not easy to be critical of the most advanced player to ever play in the NHL. He is, after all, a game-breaker in the strongest of terms, but when the bar is set at greatness, greatness is what is expected.
McDavid, though, hasn’t been great this year. It wouldn’t take much for him to go on a run, but the problem is we haven’t seen him do so this season. He’s had only one streak of three or more multi-point performances, compared to five at this point last season.
He’s up to 22 goals and 72 points this season in 51 games, which paces for 35 goals and 116 points over 82 games, or 1.41 points per game. That would be an exceptional mark for any player in the league, but for McDavid, it would be his lowest rate in a season since the 2017-18 campaign, his third in the league.
His ability to drive offence has dropped six percent from last season to 20 percent above league average, according to HockeyViz, marking an even farther climb from his offence production rate in 2022-23, which was a staggering 35 percent above league average.
This is all an overwhelming way to explain that Connor McDavid is having one of the worst seasons of his career. Weird, considering he’s still fourth in league scoring despite playing fewer games than those around them. Could those fewer games be part of it?
McDavid missed three games earlier this year after suffering an ankle injury in a game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the aforementioned trio due to his suspension. In the grand scheme of things, six games isn’t all that much, so unless there’s a lingering, unreported injury, it’s hard to imagine that being an impact.
What could be part of the issue, however, is that those around him aren’t producing as they have in recent years. Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Evan Bouchard have all seen notable drops in their offensive production through the Oilers’ first 57 games of this year compared to each of the last two.
The player who has been hit the hardest by regression has been Zach Hyman, scoring 1.1 fewer goals per hour. While his shot attempt and scoring chance metrics are strong compared to the league average rates of all forwards who have played over 1,000 minutes, he’s seen a noticeable dip from last year. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins hasn’t been quite the same either.
In fact, both he and McDavid have seen their assists per hour rate drop by a full assist since last season at this time. It’s hard not to look at that and see the correlation to Hyman’s drop in goal-scoring.
It was an undeniably tough start to the season for Hyman. He went goalless in the first 10 games after putting up a staggering 70 goals between 80 regular season games and 25 playoff games, but he’s rebounded since, now up to 19 goals in 52 games on the season. Those numbers don’t paint the full picture, though.
He would score 13 goals and 18 points in 19 games leading up to the Christmas break, and in the 23 games after said break, Hyman has scored just six goals and 14 points. He’s still chipping in some assists, but beyond a nine goal in nine game stretch in December, his goal-scoring is just not consistent enough.
It was expected that Hyman’s goal-scoring greatness wouldn’t be able to maintain at a 50+ goal pace this season, but there was some hope it would be a graceful enough fall that would allow him to still be in the 40 goal range, rather than the 30 goal range he is now.
One could be as wishful as they want for Hyman to suddenly return to last years form, but it’s hard to see that happening. For one, he’s shooting 13 percent on the season, which is right in line with the 12.5 percent he shot across a 500-game sample size prior to his 54-goal year. Given that McDavid assisted on 46 of the 70 Hyman scored last year, it’s understandable that McDavid’s offence has dropped off, too, doubly so considering he’s spent around 72 percent of his ice-time with Hyman this year.
The good news in all of this is that McDavid has always elevated his game towards the end of the season. Throughout his career, he’s averaged 1.69 points per game in March, the highest of any month, and 1.55 points per game in April, his second-highest of any month.
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