Connor McDavid played his 800th regular-season game Tuesday night in Los Angeles and walked out of Crypto.com Arena with a goal and three assists. Edmonton won 4-1. Six games into the season, he has 17 points.
Seventeen. Four goals and 13 assists, the best six-game start to a season of his career. His career total is now 1,237 points, which makes him third in NHL history. Only Wayne Gretzky at 1,892 and Mario Lemieux at 1,580 are ahead of him.
Tuesday was also his 50th career four-point game. Nine players in the history of the league have reached 50 of those. McDavid got there 800 games in.
The game ended in the first period
Edmonton scored three times before the first intermission and never had to look back. Leon Draisaitl opened it at 7:16 off a McDavid assist. Vasily Podkolzin made it 2-0 on the power play at 8:16, also off a McDavid assist. McDavid closed the period himself with a breakaway goal at 15:48.
Darcy Kuemper allowed three goals on seven shots and was pulled after 20 minutes. Anton Forsberg made nine saves in relief. Brandt Clarke got the Kings on the board at 17:29 of the second, and Podkolzin added an empty-netter at 17:42 of the third, with McDavid and Draisaitl both credited.
“Leon’s one of the best players in the world,” McDavid said of Draisaitl.
Podkolzin now has nine points on a six-game point streak, the kind of quiet development that matters more in April than it does in October. Evan Bouchard added two assists.
Devon Levi made 39 saves for his fourth straight win and became the third goalie in Oilers history to win each of his first four games with the team. He was not impressed with himself. “That’s a great bad game,” Levi said.
Los Angeles has a real problem
The Kings are 0-3-2. They have lost five straight. They have been held to one goal in three consecutive games, which is the number that should worry Los Angeles far more than the five-game skid itself.
Thirty-nine saves means Los Angeles put 40 shots on Levi and got exactly one past him. The chances are there. The finishing has gone missing for three games running, and the standings are already recording it.
Trevor Moore did not dress it up. “The belief’s there in our group, but just not good enough right now,” the Kings forward said.
He is right about the second half of that sentence. Five games into a season is early enough to fix, but a team that cannot score has very little margin while it figures out how, and the standings do not wait for anybody.
Edmonton is 5-0-1 and McDavid is the reason
The Oilers are 5-0-1 overall and 4-0-0 on the road, riding a five-game winning streak. Levi has been excellent and Podkolzin has been a pleasant surprise, but the engine is obvious.
Seventeen points in six games is nearly three a night, and McDavid is producing at that rate in the opening two weeks rather than warming into it. By his own career numbers, he has never started a season this hot.
The milestone is the headline, and passing into third place on the all-time list at 800 games is the sort of thing that gets its own graphic. The part Edmonton cares about is simpler: its best player is playing his best hockey in the first two weeks, and the team has one regulation loss to show for it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.