Toronto just beat the best team in hockey by five goals on the road, and somehow the headline conversation kept drifting back to Connor McDavid's point streak. That's become a habit worth calling out.
⚡ Upset:Maple Leafs had a 35% chance before puck drop and beat Oilers 7–2.
27%
Edmonton came into Saturday night at 8-1-1, the NHL's best record at that point of the season. Toronto came in at 6-4-2, and almost nobody expected them to walk into Rogers Place and do anything to a team averaging that kind of offense. Instead the Maple Leafs scored seven goals from six different players, got a 30-save answer from Anthony Stolarz, and left with their fourth straight win. William Nylander scored twice, including his 300th career goal, the same night Toronto dismantled the NHL's hottest club. A full team pulled off a result nobody outside the Toronto room expected.
Connor McDavid picked up two assists and extended his point streak to 11 games, and that number ended up doing more talking in the coverage than Toronto's actual performance. Leon Draisaitl's own goal streak got its mentions too. None of that is wrong on the stat sheet; McDavid kept producing inside a loss. But when a team gets run off the ice 7-2 and the story still gets built around the losing team's best player hitting a counting-stat milestone, that's a league and a media apparatus that has decided one guy is always the story, win or lose, blowout or barnburner.
RatingToronto didn't need McDavid's night to be good for their win to matter. They scored from up and down the lineup against a team that had been outscoring everybody in the league. Their goalie stood on his head for thirty shots. A team won this game, and it deserves to be treated that way instead of as a subplot in somebody else's highlight reel.
This is one result, game thirteen of an eighty-two game season, against a team that had been scorching hot and was always going to cool off eventually. Edmonton isn't suddenly bad, and Toronto hasn't solved every problem that's dogged this roster the last few seasons. That doesn't change how the result should get covered. This is just one game - it doesn't prove the Leafs are a juggernaut for the next seventy games. It proves they were the better team on this particular night, from the net out.
If Toronto wants to be taken seriously as something other than McDavid's undercard, it starts with moments like this getting called what they are: a 7-2 beatdown of the best record in hockey, and the lead story of the night.
