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SIMMONS: McDavid didn't just put on a show, he was the show

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One of these days, Connor McDavid is bound to snap.

It has to happen, doesn’t it?

When he plays like this — dancing, singing, playing an instrmment, conducting the orchestra — and then not a single note registers on the night. Not a goal. Not an assist. Not a sound.

Nothing for hockey’s single most entertaining player.

This wasn’t just another of 82 NHL stops for McDavid in his third season. He doesn’t view it that way. This is home. This matters. This is where his people are. This is where his family and his old coaches and hockey friends come to see what they can get only on television. This is where he turns it up, just a notch — his level starts above the rest of the pack. This day, this night, this trip to the place he used to sit with his dad and watch games, means everything to him.

And that’s how he played it Sunday night in a circle-the-calendar night on the Oilers schedule. He played it like no one else can play it. With Bobby Orr in the building watching Wayne Gretzky and Paul Coffey, too. 

There have been all kinds of special players in hockey history. But Orr, McDavid’s agent, Gretzky, his Edmonton mentor, and Coffey, whom he has come to know, were the kind of players you couldn’t take your eyes off. You followed them the way the way we normally follow the puck. And McDavid is the No. 1 attraction in hockey, carrying the puck from behind his own net the way Orr once did, and using a speed only Coffey can understand and then finding those open around him, the way only Gretzky could.

That was a McDavid Sunday night — maybe as great as he’s ever been, even some Edmonton front office people were saying that — and both he and his snakebit Oilers had nothing to show for it. They were somehow shut out by the outplayed Leafs, shut out by the backup goaltender, Curtis McElhinney, who did the Dominik Hasek thing for one night of his career.

McDavid did just about everything. He created offence. He set up players. He used his speed to make the Leafs look helpless. He hit goal posts. He hit cross bars. He hit men open in the slot. He had a five-point kind of night with no points on the scorecard and how long can you do this and not be ready to explode?

Especially from a night in which he was on the hook for so many local tickets and he quietly complained — as many of us have — about the cost of buying Leaf tickets. This was McDavid’s most expensive night of the season and he left nothing for chance, except an inability all around him to find a way to finish.,

“You want it to go on 5-10 minutes longer,” McDavid said afterwards, clearly shaken by the 1-0 defeat at the Air Canada Centre. “We didn’t have any luck tonight.”

Before that he said: “For a 1-0 hockey game, this was pretty entertaining.”

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Of that, he was correct. For the Oilers, it was entertaining and heartbreaking. This was the best night of this Air Canada Centre season as pure entertainment, the game most fun to watch, the most surprising, the most entertaining. You watch this kind of game and you want to scream at the National Hockey League for its geography. Toronto and Edmonton play once a year here, once a year in Edmonton, and that’s it.

And even on a night when Auston Matthews was missing and the matchup was missing and the father and son who walked in wearing the jersey of one young star and the jersey of the other, you wished there was hockey like this every night.

The NHL doesn’t need bigger nets or more scoring or even smaller goaltending equipment to be great. It needs more Edmonton and Toronto games. 

“Two pretty exciting teams when they’re going,” said Todd McLellan, the Oilers coach. It may happen one day in a Stanley Cup final. And if that doesn’t happen, we’ll all feel a little cheated along the way.

Gretzky never played Mario Lemieux in a playoff series. Sidney Crosby has yet to face Jonathan Toews. Matthews and McDavid: That would be hockey heaven, no matter what the result.

“You don’t get anything for being close,” said McDavid, knowing how far down the Oilers are in the standings, knowing that every loss comes with the notion they are one game further away from qualifying for the playoffs. “We were the better team.”

An NHL without McDavid in the playoffs is a poorer league than it was last April. But there are four months yet to figure this all out.

“This is nothing more than an Oilers-Leafs matchup,” he said before the game, even realizing those words didn’t necessarily ring true. It was more everything than just another game.

McDavid played it that way. He didn’t just put on a show Sunday night, he was the show.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

twitter.com/simmonssteve 

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