When Wayne Gretzky broke his own record — becoming the first player to accumulate 30 assists in the Stanley Cup playoff season of 1985 — he did so in a year in which the Edmonton Oilers scored more than five goals per game.
Gretzky ended that season with a breathtaking 208 points, numbers that seem impossible today, the second most that year in NHL history. There have been four 200-point scorers in the 100-plus years of NHL hockey.
Gretzky has all four of them.
And his records used to be just his records. No one else need apply. Just not anymore. Not with what the almost understated, Connor McDavid is accomplishing this Stanley Cup season, with the final heading back to Florida, and records that were never supposed to be broken are falling unexpectedly.
No one was ever supposed to knock on Gretzky’s door. That seemed a certainty. It was his game, his style, his book of records, a wide-open league, an Oilers team full of superstars, the time and the place and the circumstances just perfect to set marks that would never be touched again.
But McDavid isn’t just touching them. With his three assists Saturday night in Game 4 in Edmonton — the blowout win by the Oilers — McDavid now has 32 for this playoff season.
The most ever by anyone.
More than Gretzky. More than Mario Lemieux. More than the greatest, most explosive offensive players hockey has ever known. Happening at a time when it’s significantly more difficult to score goals and accumulate points than it was in the Gretzky-Lemieux era of free-flow dominance.
During this season, the Oilers scored at 3.58 goals per game, the best in hockey. But in 1988, when Gretzky had 31 playoff assists, the Oilers scored 5.26 goals per game. That Oilers team scored 47% more goals than this one does.
Which makes McDavid’s accomplishment this playoff season all the more astounding.
