Allen: With a little patience, Connor McDavid will be great for Oilers
ST. LOUIS — In the mid-to-late 1980s, an NHL fan’s day often started with a survey of the scoring summaries in the morning newspaper to see how many points Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux had racked up the night before.
As USA TODAY’s hockey writer, I always made it my business to see Gretzky and Lemieux in person as often as possible.
There was always a sense of anticipation that something spectacular would happen when you watched those two NHL icons.
I thought about those days Thursday morning as I conducted interviews in preparation for Connor McDavid’s NHL debut with the Edmonton Oilers. He had two shots and no points in a 3-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues Thursday night.
I had never seen McDavid play live before Thursday, and I realized that morning that I had the same mixture of intrigue and expectation I used to have three decades ago when I headed off to see Gretzky or Lemieux.
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This is not to say that McDavid will reach the level of accomplishment enjoyed by either Gretzky or Lemieux, but there is something about both McDavid and Buffalo Sabres rookie Jack Eichel that fascinates us.
"We know what (McDavid) will bring to the table for our team," said Oilers center Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. "But we aren’t going to put ridiculous pressures and expectations on him."
McDavid’s first NHL game was a solid and mature performance. He went out of his way to not hurt his team. From a coaching standpoint, he might have played it too safe. That was to be expected given what a responsible player he is. He wasn’t going to be a risk-taker in his first NHL game. That’s not who he is.
"It was kind of all a blur," McDavid said.
What I’ve noticed in 30 years as USA TODAY’s hockey writer is that the greatest players dominate because of one important aspect of their game. Some stars are great skaters, and others have gifted hands, and others have Herculean strength. But the one trait that binds them together is their ability to think about the game differently than everyone else. When Gretzky was rewriting the league's offensive record book, it was as if he was playing three dimensional chess while everyone else was playing checkers.
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He always seemed to sense what opponents would do next. Lemieux had a knack for knowing when to accelerate and when to slip into the soft areas of the defense. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when the goaltender was most vulnerable.
Both Lemieux and Gretzky had iron wills. If Gretzky had four points, he wanted five. He was driven to be the best. Lemieux dominated the game with a back injury severe enough that he couldn’t even tie his own skates.
That’s what I see in McDavid and Eichel — the imaginative thinking and the molten drive to be the best. They use their tools differently than other players their age. They seem to see plays unfolding two seconds before everyone else.
For both of them, it’s simply a matter of learning to trust their instincts in a league where coaches have zero tolerance for mistakes.
The NHL community believed it had a Gretzky vs. Lemieux-like rivalry when Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby entered the NHL together, but that rocket ride burned out quickly. Different positions. Different approaches. Different personalities. We don’t think of Ovechkin when we think of Crosby.
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The McDavid vs. Eichel comparison seems far more compelling. The No. 1 and No. 2 draft picks of 2015, one a Canadian and the other an American. Both are centers. Both can skate. Eichel wants to be better than McDavid and vice versa.
Eichel scored in his NHL debut Thursday with a memorable shot on the power play.
McDavid didn’t find the scoresheet Thursday, but you can tell by watching him that he is apprenticing for greatness.
In his first two shifts, he was just a half-second away from clean steals that could have sent him on a breakaway. In the opening two minutes of the third period, McDavid looked rocket-propelled when he blew by veteran defenseman Jay Bouwmeester and turned around Alex Pietrangelo on his way to recording his first NHL shot.
You can see that McDavid is a superstar in training. It feels like he is going to make something happen. Eichel plays that way as well.
All the Oilers need to do is be patient. "He knows he can do it and we know he can do it," Edmonton coach Todd McLellan said. "It’s figuring out when and how and against who."
Lemieux scored his first NHL goal during his first shift, on is first shot. He stole the puck away from Raymond Bourque to set up his dramatics. Gretzky registered an assist in his first NHL game, but he had scored 43 goals the season before playing in the World Hockey Association. Now Eichel has scored in his first game.
Something tells me that it won’t be long until McDavid does something that will be just as memorable as those first-game feats.
Follow columnist Kevin Allen on Twitter @ByKevinAllen.
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