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When Wayne Gretzky broke his own record — becoming the first player to accumulate 30 assists in the Stanley Cup playoff season of 1985 — he did so in a year in which the Edmonton Oilers scored more than five goals per game.
Gretzky ended that season with a breathtaking 208 points, numbers that seem impossible today, the second most that year in NHL history. There have been four 200-point scorers in the 100-plus years of NHL hockey.
Gretzky has all four of them.
And his records used to be just his records. No one else need apply. Just not anymore. Not with what the almost understated, Connor McDavid is accomplishing this Stanley Cup season, with the final heading back to Florida, and records that were never supposed to be broken are falling unexpectedly.
No one was ever supposed to knock on Gretzky’s door. That seemed a certainty. It was his game, his style, his book of records, a wide-open league, an Oilers team full of superstars, the time and the place and the circumstances just perfect to set marks that would never be touched again.
But McDavid isn’t just touching them. With his three assists Saturday night in Game 4 in Edmonton — the blowout win by the Oilers — McDavid now has 32 for this playoff season.
The most ever by anyone.
More than Gretzky. More than Mario Lemieux. More than the greatest, most explosive offensive players hockey has ever known. Happening at a time when it’s significantly more difficult to score goals and accumulate points than it was in the Gretzky-Lemieux era of free-flow dominance.
During this season, the Oilers scored at 3.58 goals per game, the best in hockey. But in 1988, when Gretzky had 31 playoff assists, the Oilers scored 5.26 goals per game. That Oilers team scored 47% more goals than this one does.
Which makes McDavid’s accomplishment this playoff season all the more astounding.
In 1985, NHL teams scored 3.89 goals per game but the high-scoring Oilers added 5.01. That was the year he broke his own playoff assist record. Before breaking it again three years later.
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That Lemieux scored 44 playoff points in 1991 — 16 goals, 28 assists — came when league scoring had actually dropped to 3.46 goals per game and the Penguins scored at 4.27 goals per game — which no one in hockey is anywhere near anymore.
Those Lemieux points came when NHL scoring was 19% more goals than McDavid’s Oilers are scoring in this special season.
The most points McDavid has scored in a regular season is 153. He had just 132 this season. Just 132. Gretzky had four 200-point seasons, and nine seasons in total with more points than McDavid has ever scored. Lemieux, who missed so many games to injury, had four years with more points than McDavid has yet to score.
Which makes this McDavid playoff run all the more impossible to explain or even quantify. It must be fascinating to be Paul Coffey right now, on the Edmonton bench, one of the great playoff scorers among defencemen in history, playing alongside Gretzky in Edmonton for so many special moments, and now watching all this up close.
At a time when 200 points in a year is beyond impossible, McDavid has set up more scores than any player before him. And he is just two points away now from 40 in the playoffs. Only four times has anyone scored 40 points in a post-season.
Three Gretzkys. One Lemieux. No one else.
When McDavid began in junior hockey, before he ever played a game, his general manager and friend, Sherry Bassin gave him a book. He wasn’t sure if McDavid would read it — because kids these days, you don’t know who reads and who doesn’t.
The book was called The Two Second Advantage, How We Succeed by Anticipating. It wasn’t a sports book but there was a chapter about Gretzky’s rare ability to be where the puck was going instead of chasing the play.
Bassin told McDavid at the time: “One day they’ll be writing another chapter about you.”
That day could be now.
Had the Stanley Cup been won Saturday night in Edmonton, the odds are that goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky would have taken home the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player in the playoffs.
There wouldn’t have been a lot of argument against the choice.
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But now the circumstances have changed. Now McDavid has managed something that’s never been done before. If the Oilers can come back — not necessarily to win the series, but it make it closer — a case could easily be made for McDavid to win the Conn Smythe.
He’s beaten a Gretzky record. He’s on his way to numbers only Lemieux and Gretzky have attained. He’s doing all this away from the 80s and 90s, when offence was more freestyle.
Only once has a skater on a losing Stanley Cup team won the Conn Smythe. That was Reggie Leach in 1976, who set the record in Philadelphia for most playoff goals at 19. McDavid has the record now for most playoff assists.
Could history — shocking at it seems, impossible as it seems, be repeating itself some 48 years later?
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