VANCOUVER — Connor McDavid isn’t right.
He won’t talk about it, but you can see it.
He opens the game with that extra gear, clearly the fastest player on the ice as we have come to expect.
Then, as the game wears on, he returns to the pack. His competitiveness, his will is the same. But his ability to separate is not.
Whatever the injury was that cost him two games earlier this season, it lingers. And in this world of utter secrecy when it comes to sports injuries, we can only assume that he is not inflicting further damage by playing, even if — to our eye — the annual Hart Trophy candidate was operating at somewhere around 70 per cent Monday night in Vancouver.
“I feel healthy enough to be out there, and I’ve got to be better,” the Edmonton Oilers star said in an exclusive interview after his team’s 6-2 loss to the Canucks on Monday.
He’s not giving up. Even though, with just 10 points through nine games played, his name sits on the second page of the NHL scoring race, slotted in 95th place.
Hockey captains don’t admit, “Hey, I’m banged up. But I’m the captain here, and right now it’s all hands on deck.”
That would be akin to McDavid dodging responsibility: “Hey, I’m injured. Someone else is going to have to get us out of this slump.”
This is a captain, doing what hockey captains do. It doesn’t make him a hero, but just a guy doing what he sees as his job.
“I’ve got to be contributing and playing the game that I can,” McDavid said. “Obviously, I’m a big part of the group and haven’t been playing well enough.”
McDavid has gone without a goal for six games. He’s done that only four times in the past six seasons.
But that is the least of his worries right now.
On Tuesday night, he attended the Oilers’ annual rookie dinner here in Vancouver, and the team commiserated around Jack Campbell, whose world came crashing down in the early afternoon when he was put on the NHL’s waiver wire. The team may have long since given up on any dreams that Campbell can help them win, but that doesn’t make it easy to see him go through something like this.
The goaltending.
The coaching.
The accountability level.
We asked him a few uncomfortable questions, and he hung in there.
On accountability: “I think there is accountability within the room,” he said, the night before Flames coach Ryan Huska benched Jonathan Huberdeau, a tactic Jay Woodcroft had eschewed with Evan Bouchard on Monday. “Obviously, we’re not lighting guys up in front of fans or media, but within the group there’s lots of talk going on. All I can speak to is the players’ side of things. We’re having lots of conversations.”
On the goaltending: “I can give you every cliché you want to hear. It’s not going to give you many headlines or many readers,” he said. “I wish I could give ya more, I wish for a lot of things, obviously. We’ve just got to work our way out of it.”
On this team’s defensive posture, and where it disappeared to:
“That’s a heck of a question, and one that we’re trying to search for. I know lots of guys have come in and said, ‘Lots of boo-boos,’ ‘lots of mistakes,’ or ‘individual mistakes…’ It feels like every little mistake we make it ends up in the back of our net. That can happen when you’re in a rut like this.”
That last quote likely speaks more to the goaltending than the one above it. But after 35 years in this dodge, I can count on one hand the number of times a payer went on the record skewering a fellow teammate or teammates’ performance.
If the Oilers wasting the McDavid years is something that sits high on your list of worries, I promise you it’s even higher on McDavid’s list. His spot in the NHL scoring race, his standing in the Hart Trophy derby, means absolutely nothing to him in comparison to where the Oilers sit in the Pacific Division standings this morning.
McDavid exited last season with a stand-up speech in the Oilers dressing room, instructing his teammates exactly what they were going to be playing for this season. And it wasn’t beating the San Jose Sharks to stay out of 32nd spot in the NHL standings on Nov. 9.
“Everybody is disappointed with the start. Sitting at 2-8-1, that’s not at all what we expected. Everybody is disappointed, myself included,” he said. “With that being said, it’s 11 games in. I can’t sit here and just give you all dooms. I’ve got to (shine) a ray of hope.
“We went (17-2-1) coming down the stretch last year. We need a run like that, and maybe then some. This group is capable of that. It may not look like that right now, but we are.
“Everyone has more to give. Myself included.”
