No. Connor McDavid is not suddenly the greatest hockey player who ever lived, and ten games into an 82-game season is a ridiculous place to be holding the trial.
What he actually did is genuinely rare and deserves to be said plainly. Thursday night in Edmonton, McDavid put up two goals and three assists, including a deflection that tied the game with 1:28 left in regulation, and the Oilers beat the defending Stanley Cup champion Hurricanes 6-5 in a shootout. That gave him 30 points in his first 10 games of the season. Only three skaters in league history had ever reached that number that fast: Mike Bossy and Wayne Gretzky, each once, and Mario Lemieux, three times. Nobody had done it in 31 years. McDavid, at 29, finished the night with eight goals and 23 assists through 10 games. Historic is the right word for what he did.
Ten games is 12 percent of a season, and nobody should crown anyone the best ever on 12 percent of anything. Gretzky owns essentially the entire career record book. He's the only player to clear 200 points in a season, and he did it four times, topping out at 215. Lemieux's 199 in 1988-89 is the only time anyone else even got near it, and he produced seasons like that while his body was falling apart underneath him. Those are decade-long cases built on bodies of work. McDavid has a brilliant two weeks.
RatingThe loudest version of the argument says this is the best hockey McDavid has ever played, in a tighter defensive era than Gretzky faced, with no real ceiling in sight. Maybe. It's a thrilling thought, and watching someone chase the first 200-point season since the Gretzky years is one of the best reasons to turn on a hockey game right now. But "might be the best start of his life" and "is now better than Gretzky" are separated by about 70 games, and everyone sprinting across that gap is leaning on arithmetic instead of evidence.
The people who invented the greatest-ever debate aren't McDavid. He's just playing. It's the pace-projection machine, the social accounts and the quick-hit features running his points-per-game out to the end of April and printing numbers north of 240 as if a tenth of a season were a forecast. It's just a multiplication problem that will read differently by Saturday. Extrapolating a hot streak to a full-season total tells you nothing about whether he can hold it, and scoring environments swing wildly across eras — back in a very different offensive climate, the 2014-15 season, an Art Ross was won with just 87 points. Pace is not a plan.
He isn't even running away with his own team's scoring lead. Through 10 games, the man sitting second behind him is his linemate Leon Draisaitl, with 21 points. Two players on one roster this far ahead of the field makes the Oilers, at 8-1-1 and winners of three straight, a genuine problem for everyone else. Admire that without turning it into a coronation.
Ask the greatest-ever question again in April. If McDavid is still doing this when the games have teeth and the legs are gone, we'll have something to argue about that isn't a calculator. Today, the honest answer is nobody knows if he can hold it, including the people already shouting that he has. Admire the player, but distrust the headline that skipped the other 72 games.
