Friday 26 June 2015 13:54, UK
Teenager Connor McDavid is ice hockey's hottest property and ahead of this weekend's NHL draft, Sky Sports Jon Saraceno has been to meet a player who is already being compared to Wayne Gretzky.
In less than four months, prodigious Canadian ice hockey talent Connor McDavid will make his highly-anticipated professional debut. The lithe teenager will trade elbows, crash into rink panels and encounter the physical rough-and-tumble of the National League Hockey yet at just 18, he still isn’t old enough to enjoy a pint of beer in some parts of his homeland.
Barring an unexpected late change of heart, the browbeaten Edmonton Oilers – who surprisingly won the lottery rights for the top pick – will choose McDavid first in Friday’s NHL draft near Miami.
Considered to be the NHL’s ‘next big thing’, the junior phenomenon blends an intoxicating on-ice cocktail of warp skating speed, deft stick-handling and rink savvy that has had scouts and coaches drooling ever since he first emerged in Ontario.
In Edmonton, where the dormant Oilers have tripped over their skates for decades, fans already have a nickname for him. They call him 'Connor McJesus' - and the burden is obvious.
“He is a special player and they don’t come along very often, every decade or so," said Florida Panthers general manager Dale Tallon, who was the second selection in the 1970 NHL draft.
“(The Oilers) have been down a long time. This guy is (supposed) to be their saviour. That’s pressure. You’re in a fish bowl in Canadian markets.’’
To his advantage, McDavid has already experienced some of the issues a team always seemingly under reconstruction, such as the Oilers, encounters.
For the last three seasons, the teenager has performed a variety of on-ice miracles to resuscitate the moribund Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League, where his speed, creativity and ‘hockey sense’ outwitted players as much as three and four years older than him.
When McDavid was 15, the Canadian Hockey League ruled he was OHL draft-eligible through a rare ‘exceptional’ player designation.
By 2015, he led the Otters to the championship series, where they were eliminated despite McDavid winning the Wayne Gretzky 99 Award as the play-offs’ top scorer with 21 goals, 28 assists and 49 points in 20 games.
But for a need to build strength – something which will come in time as he matures – the centreman is considered to have few other flaws.
McDavid scored an unprecedented hat trick this year. He was named CHL Player of the Year, Top Draft Prospect of the Year and Scholastic Player of the Year.
He missed five weeks of the regular season when he broke his right hand in an on-ice fight in November but by January, he was back on the ice and helping Canada win the gold medal at the world junior hockey championships.
“He does everything the right way,’’ said Scotty Bowman, 81, the NHL’s most successful coach and an advisor to the Chicago Black Hawks.
“He has vision and speed, a combination many guys don’t have. As long as he keeps playing the same, he is not going to be anything but a big success. And whoever plays with him, is going to score a lot of goals.’’
Kris Knoblauch, McDavid’s former OHL coach in Erie, described him as the “ultimate team player". Bobby Orr, whose Orr Group agency has represented McDavid since he was 15, is even more emphatic.
“He is a thoroughbred,’’ said the Hall of Fame defenceman, who at 18 signed the richest NHL contract ever in 1966 with the Boston Bruins and led them to a pair of Stanley Cup championships.
McDavid’s combination of peerless abilities are so rare he is already being mentioned in the same breath with once-in-a-generation NHL stars who are in the Hall of Fame, or at least heading in that direction.
Gretzky, affectionately known as ‘The Great One’, was instrumental in four Stanley Cup wins enjoyed by the Oilers in the 1980s. Recently, The Edmonton Sun quoted the retired 54-year-old all-time leading league scorer as saying: “(McDavid) has the potential to be a (Sid) Crosby, a Gretzky, a (Mario) Lemieux.’’
McDavid, mature and circumspect beyond his years, has been taken under the wing of what he calls the hockey “brotherhood”. Several former NHL greats have offered help and advice and recently he spent time with Gretzky and Crosby at a gala in Toronto.
Showing respect, McDavid called the Pittsburgh Penguins’ star centre Mr Crosby but the player gently told the kid to call him Sid. “It is very humbling,’’ McDavid said of the attention.
Dan Marr, Director of NHL Central Scouting, was a trainer with the Toronto Maple Leafs during Gretzky’s heyday in the ’80s. While he never worked directly with the superstar, he was in enough opposing locker rooms to get a sense of the superstar’s work ethic, his attitude and the respect he engendered among all players.
Over the last couple of seasons, he has been in close enough contact with McDavid to see similarities.
“That’s the first thing that struck me about Connor – it is important for him to be just one of the guys, a good team-mate and a good leader,’’ said Marr, whose scouting bureau ranks McDavid as the best player to emerge from the juniors since Crosby a decade ago. “Those were the same qualities I saw in Gretzky.’’
Ice hockey fans in Buffalo, New York believed they would be the beneficiaries of McDavid’s enormous talents. His family was thrilled at the prospect given McDavid began playing organised hockey at the tender age of three in New Market, Ontario, a mere two-hour drive from Buffalo.
Last season, the Sabres posted a league-worst 23-51-8 record, giving them the highest mathematical probability of securing the top draft choice. And yet it was the Oilers, with only an 11.5% chance of winning the first selection, who were successful.
Instead, the Sabres are poised to draft the second-highest rated amateur, Jack Eichel of Boston University. Eichel was embarrassed earlier this month when it was revealed he told NHL teams he believed he would become a superior pro to McDavid. The player team-mates call ‘Dave-o’ did not back down.
“I feel I am the best player in the draft,’’ he told reporters. “I’m not sure you would get the same answer from Jack.’’
Minutes after Edmonton won the top draft pick, McDavid appeared live from a Canadian television studio. He looked stunned and unhappy but maintains the moment was misinterpreted. It was, in his words, “more shock than anything” that he was going there.
Edmontonians are understandably thrilled McDavid is bound for the Oilers, who have great tradition but have not hoisted aloft the Stanley Cup since 1990. They haven’t even reached the play-offs in the best part of a decade.
An air of excitement is palpable in Alberta, where winters have seemed unusually frigid for many years because of repeated on-ice failures.
In the off-season, the team hired a coach in Todd McLellan and Peter Chiarelli was appointed as general manager. The Oilers are also preparing to move into a new downtown arena in autumn next year.
Earlier this month, McDavid and his parents, Brian and Kelly, visited the city with Jeff Jackson, the player’s agent at the Orr Group. “The stigma around Edmonton has changed,’’ McDavid said optimistically. “That could kind of turn you off, I guess. But, at the same time for me, Edmonton always has been: ‘Wow, that would be a cool place to play.’
It has history – and now it has young talent. “For me,” McDavid added, “it was always a place I wanted to go.’’
A city, warmed by that comforting notion, cannot wait for his arrival and others will likely look on envious as the takes the first strides of his professional career later this year.
