He looked like his dog just died.
Moments after the National Hockey League held its draft lottery, Connor McDavid walked through the bowels of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp headquarters in Toronto (this is Canada: the lottery was shown live). McDavid fiddled with his watch, kept his gaze down, blinked a bit too much and generally looked somewhere between miserable and shell-shocked.
The Edmonton Oilers had just won the draft lottery – they had an 11.5 per cent chance going in – and, barring an outbreak of madness, will be drafting McDavid first overall on June 26.
People who live in Edmonton will tell you it is a great city. People who do not live in Edmonton will not. It is cold, it is far from Earth, and its hockey team stinks.
The worst part is the hockey team.
The Oilers won the draft lottery in 2010, 2011 and 2012. They drafted Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov. All are forwards. The result, somehow, is a team that does not score a lot yet gives up a ton of goals.
McDavid is a forward, too, and piled up 120 points in 47 games as the captain of junior hockey’s Erie Otters this season. Wayne Gretzky, in an interview with the Edmonton Journal, called McDavid “the best player to come into the league in the last 30 years, the best to come along since Lemieux and Crosby. He can definitely change a franchise’s fortunes”.
McDavid might have preferred to change the Buffalo Sabres’ fortunes. Buffalo had the best chance of winning the lottery (20 per cent). As a Sabre, McDavid would be near his family and would gain a toehold in the US endorsement market.
Instead, he is off to northern Alberta. Note to McDavid: your entry-level contract lasts three years.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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