No NHL team has come back from 3-0 down to win a Stanley Cup Final since the Toronto Maple Leafs did it against the Detroit Red Wings in April 1942. Now, 82 years later, the Edmonton Oilers may change that history. On Monday night on the edge of the Everglades, the Oilers will face off against the Florida Panthers in Game 7 and try to win their fourth straight to take the Cup and become the first Canadian NHL champions since the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. If it goes the Oilers’ way, the game will most likely be crowned one of the NHL’s all-time best – or at least one of the most memorable in league history. And the Oilers captain, a generational talent, will have come back to where his career with the team began.
26 June 2015 was a Friday and there was a buzz in the BT&T Center in Sunrise, Florida, home (still, under a different name) of the Panthers. It was NHL draft night, and the assumed No 1 pick was an 18-year-old from north of Toronto who’d lit up the Ontario Hockey League for three years and led Canada to a World Junior Championship the previous winter. Connor McDavid had been playing on another level his entire life, allowed to skate at age six with the nine-year olds and granted “exceptional status” to enter the OHL at age 15, a year early, where he became the most decorated player in the league’s history.
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The Oilers were, on the other hand, coming off another dismal season. They’d finished second-last in the Western Conference. By 2015, the Oilers had become something of a perennial joke at the draft. The team picked first overall in 2010, 2011, and 2012, seventh overall in 2013, then third overall again in 2013 – each one a reflection of Edmonton’s poor performance. No matter how many top draft picks the Oilers added to the roster, they found themselves back at or near the bottom of the league over and over again. But then, here was McDavid. Could he finally be the answer?
“I think my expectations exceed any of those that anyone else puts on me,” McDavid told the Globe and Mail after the Oilers selected him first overall. “I just have to make sure I am playing my game. If I meet my expectations, the chances are I will meet everybody else’s as well.”
Those expectations were very high. Dubbed the…