Connor McDavid is dominating the NHL – now it’s time for a Stanley Cup

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Maybe the highest compliment you can pay Connor McDavid is that he puts the fun in hockey by taking the fun out of hockey.

Where other guys try, McDavid does. He makes things that should be hard simple. Not look simple. But actually be simple.

He reduces the most complex skills and tactical decisions to a series of easy-to-follow steps that anyone with average athletic ability could do it if they followed his instructions.

Connor McDavid races to 100 points this season in Oilers win over Canucks

They can’t, of course. That’s the trick. But it can seem that way when you’re watching him play. “I just look one way while I’m heading down the ice at full speed, go the opposite way, cross over, risk getting my head torn off my shoulders as I come across the crease and then plant the puck in a space the size of a deck of cards. Easy.”

On Friday, McDavid was sitting on 96 points after 52 games. That is a time-travelling pace for scoring. McDavid is a visitor from the 1980s, back when the ice was vast and unpinched, the defencemen small and timid and the goalies not yet armoured up like padded refrigerator boxes on skates.

If McDavid had been sitting on 96 on a Tuesday, the media would have waited to valorize his totals. But with Saturday space to fill, everyone decided to get their “will you get a load of this guy!” writeups out of the way.

This was also a sort of cover. With only four regular season games to go, it was possible McDavid wouldn’t hit 100 points. This way, everyone got to write and talk about it as though he did. Win/win.

What does McDavid do? He sorts the whole business out before the end of the second period on a Saturday night when everyone’s watching – a goal, three assists, first star of the game and a win that seals second place in the North Division.

McDavid isn’t dominating the NHL any more. He is lording over it. He can do what he wants, when he wants.

He has risen so high that his opponents no longer feel shame when he beats them singlehanded. They’ve gotten to that weird place where they feel half-honoured that he just handed them their heads. That is total mastery.

This year, McDavid has separated himself from all his peers, and not just in hockey. Right now, he is what no hockey player has been since Wayne Gretzky in his prime – the most commanding athlete in North American team sport.

Who’s close in that regard?

Mike Trout in baseball, maybe? Clearly the best ballplayer on aggregate, but not the best at any specific moment in time.

LeBron James in basketball? Still great, but forced by age to pick his spots.

One of three or four quarterbacks in the NFL? No one takes over a game like McDavid, as often as McDavid, with such make-you-jump-out-of-your-seat-without-realizing-you’re-doing-it explosiveness as McDavid.

If the NHL is interested in promoting the game in the United States, it should stop showing McDavid highlights on cable. He makes everyone else in the NHL look silly by comparison.

McDavid is 24 years old, already a lock for the Hall of Fame and can captain Canada until he’s 50 if he feels like it. He has fulfilled his promise as an individual talent.

Now it gets hard, because this season is the end of McDavid’s already preposterously protracted development narrative. The Oilers have been pushing that line for years, so as to combat the impression they are wasting McDavid’s youth: “Hey, hey, man, we’re not wasting anything. We’re all growing as a unit. We’re figuring things out. Just wait and see.”

We’ve waited and have yet to see anything. McDavid is fully formed. If Edmonton doesn’t start winning things now, all that individual accomplishment is going to get hung around his neck like an anchor. What is the point in being this good if it never adds up to anything more than fat cheques and Hart trophies?

As usual, this is all on McDavid. It’s only in retrospect that the really great ones, the ones who won everything in sight, seem destined to be that way.

Everybody talks about Michael Jordan now as though it were always obvious he would win six championships. It wasn’t. There were years the Bulls were Jordan, Scottie Pippen and eight other guys who happened to be there the day they were handing out the uniforms. The Jordan era wasn’t down to Jordan’s ability to score or defend. It was his inability to tolerate losing. That is the secret of his success.

In a much less aggro way, Gretzky had that same talent. So did Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby. They were each the best players of their eras, but we could just as well be sitting here talking about Dale Hawerchuk, Pavel Bure or Alex Ovechkin if they’d been the ones to marry skills with an inability to lose.

McDavid has three routes to go in his career – he can win multiple Cups and join history’s head table; he can win one and call it a vindication; or he can string together a bunch of records without ever breaking the tape at the finish line.

The window on the first scenario, the one everyone assumed he’d fulfill, is closing. Gretzky won his first Cup at 23; Lemieux was 25; Crosby was 21.

If you want to swing in that company of the best in history, time is not your friend. If the Oilers get bounced after a round or two this year, with the best (and maybe the second-best) player in hockey on their roster, and a whole bunch of guys headed to free agency, well, what then?

McDavid is in the midst of discovering one of the unfair things about being the very best – that it’s not good enough to turn yourself into the hockey player you’d always imagined you could be. In order for it to really mean something, you have to be able to do that for everyone else around you as well.