Connor McDavid

Last Season

Forty-eight goals and 90 assists in a full 82 games, on 306 shots and nearly 23 minutes a night. The raw totals undersell what the games look like: Edmonton’s offense is organized around one player’s ability to enter the zone with control, and the club’s expected-goals share collapses whenever he sits.

The Finesse Game

The skating is the first thing and the last thing. He gets to top speed inside two strides, which is what forces defensemen to turn early, and once they have turned he has beaten them - the crossover cut back into the middle is the play he has built a career on. Nobody in the league changes direction at that speed with the puck still in a shooting position.

What separates him from other fast players is that he does not treat speed as the finish. He slows the play down at the moment everyone else expects it to accelerate, drifting below the goal line or curling off the wall until a seam opens, and he is comfortable holding the puck longer than any coach would draw up because he can see the second and third options before they exist. The backhand pass into the slot is genuinely elite.

The shot is a good shot on a great passer, which is the only sense in which it is underrated. He shoots 15 percent because he takes very few bad ones - he will pass up a contested wrist shot from distance to work one more play out of the possession.

The Physical Game

He is 6-1 and 194 pounds and he plays every bit of it, but he is not a hitter and never has been. What he does have is unusual balance through contact: defensemen who get a piece of him along the wall rarely knock him off the puck, and he protects it by turning his back and using his feet rather than his frame.

The one place teams still try him is on the forecheck, hammering him a half-second after a pass. It has not worked in years. He is far better at taking a hit to make a play than most stars are willing to be, and he plays a full season of them.

The Intangibles

The competitiveness is not the marketing version. He is visibly furious about losing games and shifts, and it occasionally costs him - he will try to win a game by himself in the third period of a tight one when the simple play was on. That is the honest criticism of him and it is a small one.

The rest is a captain who has kept a team pointed in one direction for a decade. Younger players in that room learn how to practice by watching him, which is the kind of thing that never turns up in a stat line and matters more than most of what does.