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Why Connor McDavid is the greatest athlete in pro sports
When the Edmonton Oilers open their season Oct. 14, Connor McDavid will take the ice as not just the best player in the NHL, but perhaps the best athlete in all of professional sports.
If you have watched McDavid play, or even seen his highlights, you know this is true.
He flies up and down the ice like a world-class speed skater. He muscles his way to the net like a power forward, leaving the game’s best goalies overmatched. He makes defenders look silly with jaw-dropping dekes and dangles. If he gets in open ice, it’s wheel, snipe, celly, boys.
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McDavid is the greatest NHL player since Wayne Gretzky, and may eventually challenge The Great One as the best of all time. He is the Michael Jordan of hockey, changing the game the way His Airness did.
There is no other professional athlete in team sports today that dominates his game quite like McDavid. At age 26, he is on pace to challenge LeBron James, Lionel Messi and Tom Brady as the most dominant athletes of the past two decades.
McDavid has already won the NHL MVP Hart Trophy three times, and the NHLPA MVP award voted on by the players four times. By comparison, LeBron has won four NBA MVPs, while Jordan won five. Brady won three NFL MVPs.
McDavid has already matched NHL legends Mario Lemieux, Alex Ovechkin and Bobby Orr with three MVPs, trails Eddie Shore by just one, and is three behind Gordie Howe. At the peak of his career, Gretzky’s nine Hart trophies is not out of reach.
McDavid has already led the NHL in scoring five times, putting him in the elite company of Gretzky, Lemieux, Howe, Phil Esposito, Bobby Hull and Jaromir Jagr.
In eight seasons in the league, the eight-time All-Star has scored more than 100 points six times. The only seasons he came up short were in his 45-game rookie season in 2015-2016 and in 2019-20, when he scored 97 points in just 64 games. A year later, he made a mockery out of the COVID-shortened season, scoring an astounding 105 points in 56 games.
And he is coming off his best season, scoring a career-high 64 goals and 153 points in 82 games to sweep all the NHL performance-related awards last season. His 64 goals were the most since Ovechkin’s 65 in 2007-08. His 153 points were 15th in league history and the most since Steve Yzerman’s 155 in 1988-89.
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Hopefully, this is the season McDavid is finally recognized as the greatest player in team sports.
The fact that he is not and is so often overlooked frustrates Upper Deck President Jason Masherah, whose company has an exclusive card and memorabilia deal with McDavid.
“To me, Connor McDavid is the best athlete in all of sports. But in the U.S., a lot of people don’t even know who Connor McDavid is,” Masherah says.
He is right. MLB stars like Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout are household names. Patrick Mahomes is the biggest star in the NFL, while the NBA is enjoying the emergence of new stars like Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
None of them are as dominant as McDavid. Not even Ohtani, the two-way star drawing comparisons to Babe Ruth. Ohtani may win his second AL MVP this season, but his pitching future is in doubt after his second Tommy John surgery.
Mahomes, a two-time NFL MVP, is the best quarterback and player in the NFL, but not by a wide margin. The NBA has a host of young stars, but none of them have separated themselves and entered Jordan/LeBron territory.
To Masherah, there is no debate. McDavid takes the argument hands-down.
“Watching him right now is very similar to watching Wayne Gretzky in the ’80s,” Masherah says. “He is so much better than basically every other hockey player in the NHL it is insane, and he showed that with his statistics [last] year. He is a completely different level and tier than every other hockey player, and it’s frustrating when you see people celebrating second-tier athletes in other sports and they don’t know who Connor McDavid is.”
The only thing missing from McDavid’s resume is a Stanley Cup, due largely to no fault of his own. To earn the recognition of recent stars like Brady, LeBron and even Mahomes, he must lead the Oilers to an NHL championship.
He should have another shot this season to get the Oilers to the Stanley Cup Finals, hopefully in a rematch of 2006 against my Carolina Hurricanes.
Whether he makes it or not, it is time McDavid was recognized as not only one of the greatest players in NHL history but the best athlete in pro sports today.
— Jeff Owens is the editor of SCD. You can reach him at jowens@aimmedia.com. For more National coverage, visit sportscollectorsdigest.com.
Jeff Owens is the editor of SCD.
