Connor McDavid's Five-Point Night Makes NHL History as Oilers Edge Hurricanes 6-5 in a Shootout

Connor McDavid turned a two-goal hole against the defending Stanley Cup champions into a line in the NHL record book. The Edmonton Oilers captain scored twice and added three assists on Thursday night at Rogers Place — five points, in on five of Edmonton’s six goals — and his fourth point of the night made him the fourth player in league history to record 30 points in the first 10 games of a season. Edmonton beat the Carolina Hurricanes 6–5, the winner settled only when Ryan Nugent-Hopkins scored the lone goal of the shootout in his first game of the season.

Thirty points in ten games

The company is the story. Before Thursday, three names had ever opened a season with 30 points in 10 games: Wayne Gretzky and Mike Bossy, both in 1984–85, and Mario Lemieux, who did it three times — 1988–89, 1992–93 and 1995–96. McDavid is the first player to join them in 31 years, and the first to do it in the 21st century. The milestone point was not one of his goals: it was the secondary assist on Leon Draisaitl’s third-period power-play goal, his fourth point of the game, scored with Edmonton chasing a game it had trailed 4–2 after two periods.

He did not stop at the threshold. McDavid finished the night at 31 points — eight goals and 23 assists through 10 games — the most any Oiler has ever scored in the first 10 games of a season, passing Gretzky’s own 1984–85 mark with the franchise. And this was his third five-point game inside those 10 games, a start only Lemieux had ever matched. Numbers like that are usually arguments about eras. On Thursday they were simply the box score: 2 goals, 3 assists, a plus-1 rating and 25:02 of ice time, every one of Edmonton’s lines in the game bent around its captain.

Down 4–2, then the two of them took it

For two periods, this was Carolina’s night. The Hurricanes — the defending champions — led 1–1 after one and then scored three times in the second to take a 4–2 lead into the third. Edmonton’s answer came from the pair who have answered for a decade. Draisaitl matched McDavid point for point, two goals and three assists of his own, and the two of them combined for 10 points on the night. Draisaitl’s power-play goal, set up by McDavid’s milestone assist, started the third-period climb; Edmonton scored three times in the third period to Carolina’s one.

The tying goal was McDavid’s second of the game and his eighth of the season, scored with 1:28 left in regulation to make it 5–5. Sebastian Aho led Carolina with a goal and an assist, and the Hurricanes had the champions’ version of this game in their hands for 40 minutes — a two-goal lead, on the road, against a team that had won two straight. What they did not have was an answer for the last 20 minutes of McDavid and Draisaitl playing a game that bent entirely toward them.

Nugent-Hopkins finished it

Overtime solved nothing, and the shootout came down to a player skating in his first game of the season. Nugent-Hopkins scored the only goal of the shootout, a 1–0 skills decision on top of the 5–5 tie, and Edmonton’s third straight win was official: 6–5, and a record of 8–1–1 through 10 games. For a season opener’s worth of storylines — a comeback from two down, a shootout winner in a season debut, two linemates with five points each — the game kept returning to the same fact.

Ten games into the season, McDavid has 31 points, and the list of players who have ever started a season this fast fits on one line: Gretzky, Bossy, Lemieux, and now him. The photograph at the top of this story is the night in miniature — an Oilers goal celebration at Rogers Place, Draisaitl’s No. 29 raised at the edge of the huddle and McDavid in the middle of it, the 97 on his helmet the only part of him the camera could find. Fitting, on a night when the whole game orbited the same player.