McDavid has his day as Oilers ‘assisting’ captain hits triple digits

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You kind of got the feeling the Edmonton Oilers weren’t going to stop until they got Connor McDavid his 100th assist of the season.

Nine goals into a 9-2 win over the lowly San Jose Sharks at Rogers Place on Monday, and you were right.

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There were 99 reasons why the Oilers captain is having a season that he is (despite ‘only’ reaching the 30-goal milestone) and somehow finding some other way to one-up his five-trophy take home from a season ago, when he led the league in goals, assists and, obviously, points.

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And with the 100th he added Monday, McDavid became just the fourth player in NHL history to triple-digit his way in helpers in one season, joining Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr and, of course, Wayne Gretzky, who reached the feat in 11 different seasons — you know, just in case getting there once, like the rest, wasn’t tough enough.

That much we know, and had to wait three full games as McDavid sidelined himself to take care of a minor-yet-nagging lower-body injury. In the meantime, the chance arose where McDavid might not have been the fourth player ever to do it, but the fifth, thanks to the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Nikita Kucherov.

He leads the way in NHL scoring with 141 points on 43 goals, and quietly crept his way into the 100-point conversation in McDavid’s absence, recording his 99th earlier in the night in a 4-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres, of all teams, who immediately turned around and fired their head coach, Don Granato, Tuesday after missing the playoffs for a third straight season.

But the Sabres rattled off enough of a performance a night earlier to ensure McDavid enjoyed his day in the sun with a solo assist parade.

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“That is insane, just a casual 100 assists every year,” McDavid said of Gretzky, who was last to hit 100 assists back in 1990-’91 to make it 11 in a row. “That is why he is the greatest of all time.”

One of the reasons, anyway. And a big one, considering you could take away Gretzky’s career goals and he would still have enough points to be the NHL’s all-time leader with 1,963 assists.

He averaged 1.32 of them per game.

This year, McDavid earned 100 assists in 75 games, giving him 1.33 per game. So, this is about as close a glimpse as Oilers fans can get to reliving history.

But it hasn’t been a sustainable pace up to this point for McDavid, who still manages to impress with 647 assists in 644 games played.

“It was not something that you ever set out saying, ‘I want to do this,’ it just kind of happened naturally,” McDavid said. “I had that weird stretch where I didn’t score any goals, but I had a bunch of assists. That was kind of when I was made aware of it.

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“It is not something you set out to do, or whatever, it was just a product of playing with some really good players, playing on a good team and putting in a lot of hard work.”

In trickle-down Reagan-omics terms, Zach Hyman is the biggest beneficiary of McDavid’s unprecedented charitability with the puck, scoring a career-high 54 goals to sit one behind the Florida Panthers’ Sam Reinhart in second place.

“He’s always a threat,” Hyman said. “He creates so much time for himself with his speed that you often get odd-man rushes 3-on-2 and 2-on-1s and he’s really deceptive with his ability to change the angle on a pass to make a saucer pass and it’s really hard to defend a guy who moves that fast and stickhandles the way he does and make plays.

“He does all those things and makes the right read so many times. It’s fun to play with.”

Fittingly, it was Hyman who scored the backdoor tap-in on McDavid’s 100th helper.

“It’s special to be a part of that moment,” Hyman said. “We’ve scored that type of goal a bunch this year, so it’s fitting that was the way.

“To be a part of it, it’s pretty cool. To be a part of history. Only three other guys have done it and those guys are pretty special players, so it’s pretty cool company.”

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And somehow, at the same time, it felt like just another Monday night in McDavidland.

“It is probably the hardest one that he has accomplished,” Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said of McDavid’s latest feat. “You can’t really be surprised with the things he does every year. It is an amazing accomplishment. You probably didn’t think it was possible for it to happen in this day and age, but he keeps surprising you. I am very proud of him.

“It is exciting for us to be a part of it and to get to see him on a day-to-day basis. It’s not just in the games, it’s him dominating in practices and pushing us to get better and to work harder and to translate that into the game.”

E-mail: gmoddejonge@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge

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