How many points would Connor McDavid score in other leagues around the world?

When you watch Connor McDavid play hockey, it’s sometimes hard to imagine him doing anything else for a living rather than simply lighting up the NHL.

McDavid’s 153 points with the Edmonton Oilers this past season were utterly ridiculous and possibly the best season we’ll see over the next few decades.

Sure, Wayne Gretzky was able to put up point totals over 200 on four separate occasions during the 1980s, but it’s Edmonton’s current captain as the obvious choice for the most dominant player in the world we’ve seen in quite some time.

While Gretzky lit up the WHA in 1978-79 before the Oilers joined the NHL, it’s hard to imagine McDavid ever playing anywhere other than the best league in the world.

But what if, hypothetically, he did just that? Given that he was a near-unanimous MVP in the NHL this season, it’s obvious that McDavid could slot into any league worldwide and dominate.

And though we don’t have the means to suddenly transport McDavid on a worldwide tour across different leagues, we can make our best estimates using Dobber Hockey’s NHLe, a tool designed to extrapolate how well a given prospect will translate into the NHL as they enter the NHL.

Slotting in a player’s point total and games played in another league around the world gives us an output that guesses what they’d score over 82 NHL games.

Here’s the system: find a point total that exhibits an NHLe of 153 for each respective league on the tool.

It’s, of course, an imperfect tool: it’s designed to project how players would translate going into the NHL rather than leaving it to go light up those other leagues, and the translation factors haven’t been updated in a few seasons.

Some of the outputs, as you’ll see, it might be nearly impossible to imagine a player being that dominant at any level of the sport. We’ll admit, they’re far more believable totals should McDavid stay pro than rather be transported back in time to junior or college age.

But at the very least, here’s how the numbers in various leagues translate to the 153 points McDavid put up this past season.

McDavid stays pro

KHL: 158 points in 68 games

Sweden: 163 points in 52 games

Switzerland: 206 points in 52 games

Czechia: 207 points in 52 games

Finland: 248 points in 60 games

AHL: 277 points in 72 games

The current KHL single-season scoring record is 85 points, set by Sergei Mozyakin in 2016-17. But in 2012-13, Evgeni Malkin put up a record-setting 1.75 points per game during an NHL lockout season where he played 37 games with Magnitogorsk Metallurg.

Viewed widely as the second-best hockey league in the world after the NHL, McDavid would comfortably be the game’s best player, though his scoring totals would still probably only be a hair higher than his current marks with the Oilers, albeit in 14 fewer games.

It’s the rest of Europe that McDavid would likely dominate — though there’s no shortage of talent in Sweden, Switzerland, Czechia, and Finland, there’s less of a track record of retaining top stars to stay home if NHL options arise.

And then there’s his AHL projection — could McDavid really average 3.84 points per game?

The current AHL scoring record is 138 points in 78 games, set by Don Biggs in 1992-93 with Binghamton. But there’s a reason you probably haven’t heard of Biggs — he played just 12 NHL games.

The greatest junior season… ever?

OHL: 394 points in 68 games

WHL: 421 points in 68 games

QMJHL: 447 points in 68 games

We’ve seen McDavid in junior before, of course, where he put up 120 points in just 47 regular season games in his final year with the OHL’s Erie Otters.

Mario Lemieux once put up 282 points in 70 games with Laval in the QMJHL in 1983-84, the greatest single season in junior hockey history. But he was also 18 at the time, whereas McDavid is now 26.

A grown man like McDavid would obviously terrorize teenaged defenders, though admittedly, as great as he is, scoring somewhere between 394 points to 447 points seems a little unlikely, considering the highest-scoring team in junior — the Halifax Mooseheads —  put up 335 goals this past year.

Still, if anyone could do it, it’d probably be McDavid.

What if McDavid was in college?

WCHA: 170 points in 40 games

Hockey East: 190 points in 40 games

Big 10: 224 points in 40 games

CCHA: 234 points in 40 games

ECAC: 267 points in 40 games

College hockey players tend to play varying amounts of games based on how far they progress in conference and national tournaments, so I decided to normalize the schedule at 40 games in each of the five conferences offered on the tool.

Though McDavid would’ve no doubt had many interested parties in recruiting him to play NCAA hockey, it was never a realistic path from the time he joined the OHL a year early as an exceptional player back in 2012.

Tony Hrkac’s 116 points with North Dakota in 1986-87 are the single-season record in the NCAA, though he never hit more than 48 points in an NHL season.

Over the last decade, the best college season we’ve seen was the 80 points dropped by Johnny Gaudreau in 2013-14, when he was with Boston College.

But simply put, the college game has never quite seen a talent like McDavid — and even if the suggestions of over six points a game on the model for the ECAC might be a little ludicrous, we’d have every reason to believe McDavid could absolutely torch the NCAA record book in ways we’ve never seen.

You might also like:
• Former Oiler Nail Yakupov set to play for fourth KHL team in five years