Connor McDavid is the best player in the world. That may be exactly why the Edmonton Oilers keep losing.
Recently a player who played with McDavid over the last few years before moving on admitted to me it’s really hard to just NOT give him the puck and let him go. That always feels like your best move he noted…He talso old me that while the coaches wanted you NOT to just give it to McDavid, Connor is so amazing and would want the puck so much that you really had no choice but to let him take it and run..
There is a peculiar kind of organizational dysfunction that can only exist in the shadow of transcendent greatness. It is the dysfunction of a franchise that has come to believe that having the best player in the world is sufficient — that if you build a team around a generational talent and give him a worthy sidekick, the Stanley Cup will eventually follow. The Edmonton Oilers have operated on this assumption for the better part of a decade. Connor McDavid keeps proving it wrong.
This is not an argument that Connor McDavid is anything less than extraordinary. He is, by nearly every statistical measure available, the most gifted hockey player on the planet. His career regular-season points-per-game rate, his playoff scoring dominance, his plus/minus — all of it defies historical comparison. But greatness, in a team sport, has a shadow side. And the shadow that McDavid casts over the Edmonton Oilers has, in some measurable and important ways, allowed an organization to repeatedly fail its greatest player while hiding that failure behind the spectacle of his genius.
Sidney Crosby never let that happen in Pittsburgh. And the numbers explain why.
The Trap of the Two-Man Show
Start with the most revealing number in this entire analysis: there's one very striking similarity between Crosby and McDavid. They've always had an amazing sidekick they could play with them when it was needed in Malkin and Draisaitl…
Over the course of Connor McDavid's NHL career, approximately 30% of his regular-season points have come on goals where Leon Draisaitl also registered a point on the same play. Nearly one-third of McDavid's entire offensive production is co-produced with a single teammate. In the playoffs, that number climbs to 38%. So between 3 and 4 of every ten McDavid points, whether in October or in Game 7, run through Leon Draisaitl.
Now consider Sidney Crosby. Over his career, approximately 15.6% of his regular-season points came on goals where Evgeny Malkin also registered a point. In the playoffs, accounting for the multiple seasons Malkin missed due to injury — that figure drops further, to an estimated 13.5%. Crosby's creative output does not flow primarily through any single player. It flows through everyone.
What this means is that when a team prepares for the Edmonton Oilers in a playoff series, they face a familiar tractable problem: contain two players. Neutralize McDavid and Draisaitl — deploy your best defensive pair against their line, build a trap system designed to take away the rush, and dare the remaining Oilers to beat you — and you have addressed, according to these numbers, somewhere between 30% and 50% of Edmonton's offensive output if you succeed. The blueprint for beating Edmonton in a seven-game series is not a secret. It is the most widely distributed coaching memo in the Western Conference: make McDavid earn everything, shadow Draisaitl, and wait. The 2019 first-round exit. The 2020 qualifying-round loss to a weaker team. The 2021 first-round collapse against Winnipeg. The 2023 second-round exit against Vegas. And then two consecutive Stanley Cup Final losses — in 2024 and 2025 — where the formula was used against them on the biggest stage in the sport.
Crosby's 15.6% overlap with Malkin tells a structurally different story. A coaching staff preparing for Pittsburgh had to account for Crosby creating offense with Phil Kessel, with Evgeni Malkin creating offense on a separate line, with Chris Kunitz, with Jake Guentzel, with Matt Cullen. There was no single thread to pull.
The GWG Paradox: When Being the Closer Is a Warning Sign
Game-winning goals are the purest measure of clutch production — the goal that flipped a game from a loss to a win, scored at the moment it mattered most. Over his career in Edmonton, Connor McDavid has scored 75 regular-season game-winning goals in 451 team wins, a rate of 16.6%. That is a stunning figure. McDavid has personally been responsible for the decisive goal in one of every six Oilers victories over his career.
Sidney Crosby, across 21 seasons in Pittsburgh, has 104 game-winning goals in 896 team wins, a rate of 11.6%.
At first glance, McDavid's higher percentage looks like an argument in his favor. He is the clutch performer. He scores the big goal more often. But look more carefully, and the number inverts. McDavid's high GWG rate is not evidence of elevated clutch ability — it is evidence of a team that requires him to be the closer, game after game, because it does not have enough other players capable of delivering when the score is tied in the third period.
When Crosby does not score the game-winner in Pittsburgh, Malkin scores it. Or Kessel. Or Guentzel. Or Kunitz. The Penguins, built deliberately and deeply, produced winning goals from multiple sources. The Oilers, in their organizational reliance on McDavid's genius, have constructed a roster where the burden of the decisive moment falls, over and over again, on the same man.
This is what organizational failure looks like when it is camouflaged by greatness. McDavid's 16.6% GWG rate is not just impressive — it is a quiet emergency signal, a number that says: this team is asking too much of one player.
The playoff figures bring the argument into sharpest relief. McDavid's career playoff GWG rate is 9.8% — five game-winning goals across 51 Edmonton playoff victories. Crosby's is 9.2% — nine game-winning goals across 98 Pittsburgh playoff victories. They are virtually the same. In the cauldron of the playoffs, McDavid is no more and no less clutch than Crosby. But Crosby converted his clutch into championships. McDavid converts his into first-round exits and runner-up finishes.
The difference is not the player. It is the team around him.
The Organizational Cover: How McDavid Masks Edmonton's Failures
When a franchise possesses the best player in the world, it acquires a very dangerous luxury: the ability to paper over its own mistakes. Every bad contract signed in Edmonton, every depth player who was overpaid, every failed draft pick, every coaching change that didn't solve the underlying problem — all of it was absorbed into the background noise of McDavid's highlight-reel brilliance. The team wasn't good enough? Well, McDavid scored 153 points this year. How bad can it be?
The answer, in the context of team building, was: bad enough.
Consider what the numbers tell us about Edmonton's playoff record in the McDavid era. The Oilers made the playoffs in 2017, lost in the second round. They were eliminated in the qualifying round in 2020. They lost in the first round in 2021. They lost in the second round in 2022 and 2023. They reached the Stanley Cup Final in 2024 — the furthest the franchise had gone since 2006 — and lost in seven games to Florida, having been down 3-0 in the series. They reached the Final again in 2025 and lost again.
McDavid's playoff totals over those runs: 150 points in 96 games, a 1.56 points-per-game rate, a +31 plus/minus. These are numbers that would make any team a heavy Stanley Cup favorite. And Edmonton keeps losing anyway.
Sidney Crosby's playoff rate is 1.12 points per game. Lower than McDavid's. But Crosby has three rings. The gap between those two points-per-game figures — 0.44 points per game in McDavid's favor — represents nothing in terms of championship outcomes, because championships are not awarded for points per game. They are awarded to the last team standing. And the last team standing is almost always the one with the best supporting cast, the best depth, and the best distribution of offensive responsibility.
Pittsburgh built that team three times. Edmonton has not built it once.
What Crosby Did That McDavid Hasn't..it goes beyond a goalie..
Crosby's career regular-season plus/minus of +198 across 1,241 games is the product of a player who has functioned within strong teams throughout his career. McDavid's +383 in 862 games is the product of a player who is almost always the best player on the ice regardless of the score and situation, elevating a team that, without him, would often be pedestrian.
But the most important thing Crosby has done — the thing that does not appear cleanly in any single statistic — is to make the players around him believe they are capable of winning. Chris Kunitz was a perfectly good power forward who became a Stanley Cup champion. Matt Cullen was a checking center in the twilight of his career who contributed to two championship runs. Jake Guentzel, drafted in the third round, exploded into one of the game's better power forwards because playing alongside Crosby showed him what was possible.
The partner overlap of 15.6% with Malkin does not just tell us that Crosby distributed offense broadly. It tells us that he trusted his teammates enough to let them create without him. He did not need to be involved in every important play. He did not need to manufacture every dangerous moment through a single partner. He played within a system while also transcending it.
McDavid, whether by coaching philosophy, organizational design, or the emergent reality of his own singular ability, has operated more often as a system unto himself — a closed loop of genius between him and Draisaitl that is devastating in bursts and containable in series.
The Finals: Where the Pattern Becomes Undeniable
The two Stanley Cup Final losses tell the story in their starkest terms. In 2024, the Oilers fell behind 3-0 to the Florida Panthers before staging the greatest comeback in Finals history — winning three straight games to force a Game 7, which they then lost. It was an extraordinary demonstration of resilience, driven largely by McDavid and Draisaitl. And then, in Game 7, when it mattered most, the Panthers found a way.
In 2025, the Oilers lost again. Same building. Same result. Different opponent, same outcome: McDavid with brilliant individual numbers, Edmonton falling short.
The Panthers did what every team that has beaten Edmonton has done: they limited the damage from McDavid and Draisaitl, made life difficult for the secondary contributors, and waited for the moments when the Oilers needed a third or fourth offensive contributor to deliver — and those contributors did not deliver.
Crosby never put his team in that position. In 2016 and 2017, when the Penguins were defending champions, they won because Crosby was brilliant and because the rest of the team was capable of independent offensive production. Phil Kessel was a hero in 2016. Jake Guentzel scored 13 goals as a rookie in 2017. The Penguins won because they had become bigger than any one player — even Crosby.
That is the championship formula. And it is the formula Edmonton, in its decade of McDavid worship, has never quite managed to build.
The Verdict: Greatness Is Not Enough
Connor McDavid is a +31 in the playoffs. His 1.56 playoff points per game is the best of his generation. His regular-season GWG rate of 16.6% is extraordinary. His career plus/minus of +383 is historically elite. He is, by almost any individual measure, the finest player of his era. He is the best one on one players ever…maybe Mario is tied with him…
And the Edmonton Oilers have nothing to show for it.
The argument is not that McDavid has failed his team. The argument is that McDavid's individual greatness has functioned as an organizational anesthetic...numbing the front office, the coaching staff, and the fanbase to the structural inadequacies of a team that was never truly built to win a championship, because the assumption was always that McDavid could simply will one into existence.
WHAT SAY YOU?
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