Connor McDavid: What there is to Learn about his learning curve

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After being named Player of the Year for the 2011–12 season of the Greater Toronto Hockey League, recording 79 goals and 130 assists, Hockey Canada, the governing body for amateur hockey in Canada, granted McDavid “Exceptional Player” status, which permitted McDavid to play in the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) a year earlier than would otherwise be permissible for a player his age. He was only the third player to receive that status, after John Tavares and Aaron Ekblad.

One always had to assume that when it came to getting the hang of the NHL, the speed with which he could be able to do it would be significantly greater than that of just about any 18-year-old to come into the league since Sidney Crosby. Simply put: His talent, hockey IQ, and quality of teammate assured that he’d just about hit the ground running.

Where the “just about” comes in was, of course, in the first four games of the season, in which he put up a single goal — and not what we’d think of as being a particularly McDavidian goal, at that — and generally didn’t far too well overall. You write these kinds of things off as him getting his sea legs and potentially forging some chemistry with his linemates, and so on. Pretty easy to see why he’d struggle.

The other thing to consider here, though, is that the quality of competition in terms of TOI share he’s facing hasn’t changed much at all, but the quality of teams giving those players those minutes very much has, to an almost ludicrous extent. As has the venues in which those games were played.

In Edmonton’s first four games, the opponents were at St. Louis (0-0-0), at Nashville (0-0-0), at Dallas (1-0-1), and home against St. Louis (0-0-0). In the second four games, it was at Calgary (2-1-3), at Vancouver (0-1-1), at home against Detroit (1-0-1), and at home against Washington (1-1-2). No longer were the Oil clashing against the steel of the NHL’s toughest division, but rather against the horrific Flames, middling Canucks, okay Red Wings, and good Capitals. That’s going to make it a lot easier to score, even if the overall quality of competition by team hasn’t changed.

The guys to whom the Flames are giving about 17.5 percent of their 5-on-5 ice time is necessarily going to be worse than the guys getting those same minutes from the Stars or Blues. Stands to reason.

The good news for McDavid is that when it comes to “playing bad teams to pad your stats,” there are plenty of them in his division; and by the end of the season none of this is going to matter anyway, because you can rest assured he will have figured out how to score in the league against literally anyone the opposition can put in front of him.

It’s not reasonable to expect the pace over the last four games is going to continue. I know it’s shocking that I’m saying an 18-year-old won’t score 1.75 points per game for the next 74 games (that would put him at about 131 points for the season, one shy of Teemu Selanne’s rookie record), but even if he settles down into his overall pace of point-a-game hockey, that’s still incredible. And it probably isn’t out of the question that he goes a little better than that for the rest of the year and pushes 90, based on what we’ve seen and what we know his ceiling to be.

This kid is unbelievably good, but it’s probably unreasonable to say he’s totally figured out the NHL even if the last four games suggest as much. A midseason swoon isn’t out of the question, because that happens too.

What We Learned

Anaheim Ducks: It’s not good when you can put together a list like this like three weeks into the season and have it populated with more than zero players.

Arizona Coyotes: Here’s a Mikkel Boedker hat trick. The first two goals are real nice, and that’s Erik Karlsson he torches for the first one. Not easy to outskate him.

By Ryan Lambert2 hours agoPuck Daddy

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/what-we-learned–connor-mcdavid-vs–the-learning-curve-135705931.html