The Edmonton Oilers are perceived to have been cruising on Connor McDavid's nickname more than a decade now, and will be for maybe another decade. And while it became a matter of cross-border amusement that McJesus could not win a Stanley Cup from a guy nicknamed Bob, it was also true that McJesus was both aptly and unironically named. This has not been more evident than this season, in which he not only led the league with 138 points (48 goals, 90 assists) but was an even more central truth in that he scored a point in all but 14 games this season, and the Oilers lost every one of those 14. If that isn't the very definition of a most valuable player, then value is just another beauty contest.
Then came Monday night and, for you trogs who live on the wrong side of the continental shelf, this morning. There was no McDavid point in Game 1 of the Oil's first-round series against the Anaheim Ducks, but the reflexive defeat didn't happen either. Edmonton took a 2-0 lead that, given it's the Ducks, seemed insurmountable, and gave it back and then some over 14 minutes of the second period. Given the Oilers' successive Final losses to Florida, the postseason has become as much a trigger as a reward, and McDavid not breaking the seal on his playoff would seem to negate the return of Leon Draisaitl from injury hell, at least for the fans and vagrants who stood outside the arena watching on big screens.
Well, McDavid didn't make the scoresheet in the final period either, although Draisaitl did, but the Oilers did something odd. They stole the game back and escaped with a 4-3 win that was very much against what we like to call the run of play. It was their first win without a point from McDavid since last May, when they knocked Vegas out with a 1-0 win in the conference semifinals.
The Kasperi Kapanen game-winner, though, merely won the game. The game-tying goal by Jason Dickinson seven minutes earlier bonded them in solidarity with Toronto Maple Leafs fans whose interests begin and end with the Leafs, in that Mattias Ekholm broke down Anaheim defenseman/enforcer Radko Gudas so comprehensively that Gudas fell down. Gudas matters because it was his knee-on-knee collision with Toronto's McDavid, Auston Matthews, on March 12 that cratered not only Matthews's knee but Toronto's already miserable season. More than that, it caused a team-wide crisis about what it means to be a team, a crisis that has become a solid month of angst-and-rage-powered actual and psychic purging that is still going on even though the Leafs aren't playing. Gudas's embarrassment was surely a small but satisfying victory in Ontario, and in Canada at large, for Gudas's role in knocking Sidney Crosby out of the Olympics.
It's hard enough to get the dominion to unite despite their own provincial hockey biases—the Leafs are the second-most popular team in Canada behind Not The Leafs—but that goal provided its own form of retribution, and a downright reassuring boon for Alberta, where McDavid's one-game statistical silence could have created its own Leaflike churn of self-reflective panic. Meanwhile, the national Cup drought has reached 33 years and achieved socio-political significance. Having three Canadian teams in the postseason alone keeps the citizens busy, but Ottawa is down two games to nothing against Carolina so they may only be part of the tapestry for a moment longer. That leaves Montreal (up 1-0 against Tampa Bay) and Edmonton, McDavid or otherwise. That “otherwise” probably isn't sustainable, but Oilers fans at least can take comfort in the fact that winning without him scoring is at least possible. And if that’s possible, anything is.
