Connor McDavid will step onto the ice at Scotiabank Arena on Saturday night carrying a 20-game season-opening point streak, and the next point he records would push him into a sliver of NHL history. The Edmonton Oilers center enters the matchup with the Toronto Maple Leafs already leading the league with 49 points, including 11 goals and 38 assists.
That is why Oilers vs Maple Leafs is drawing attention now. McDavid is playing in his hometown, Toronto is trying to steady itself after five straight losses at home, and Edmonton arrives with three straight wins and points in 11 of its past 13 games. The Oilers are 14-3-3, while the Maple Leafs are 8-11-2, a gap that has made this one of the league’s more lopsided matchups on paper despite the setting.
The streak itself is rare enough to make the game matter beyond the standings. McDavid is one of only four players in NHL history to register a point in each of the first 20 games of a season, so one more point would make him the fifth to reach 50 points by his 21st game. That is the mark hanging over Saturday’s game: not just whether he scores, but whether he keeps a pace that almost no one in the league has ever matched.
Toronto has already shown it can damage Edmonton, beating the Oilers 7-2 at Edmonton on Oct. 24. William Nylander scored two goals in that win, though he has only three goals in his past eight games since then. The Maple Leafs now get McDavid in a building where they have lost five straight games by a combined 22-9, which gives the home crowd a chance to either watch a milestone unfold or watch their team drag one more hot opponent into its skid.
The only wrinkle is that nothing about McDavid’s streak is guaranteed. A point in 20 straight games is already rare; extending it in Toronto would turn it into a cleaner historical number and keep Edmonton’s climb going at the same time. If he does it, the story shifts from an impressive run to one that belongs in a much smaller club.
