Edmonton Oilers star Connor McDavid has opened the 2026-27 NHL season by forcing a conversation that once seemed permanently closed.
Through the Oilers’ first 10 games, the captain has piled up 31 points, a total that places him in an exclusive historical group previously occupied only by Wayne Gretzky, Mike Bossy and Mario Lemieux.
According to league records cited by Sportsnet, McDavid is just the fourth player ever to reach 30 points in the opening ten contests of a season; Lemieux managed the feat three separate times with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The achievement arrives in an era of tighter checking, larger goaltending equipment and lower overall scoring than the free-flowing 1980s that produced the other members of the club.
The arithmetic is almost absurd. At the present rate McDavid would finish an 84-game schedule with roughly 260 points, a figure that would erase Gretzky’s single-season record of 215 set with the Oilers in 1985-86.
Lemieux once came within a point of the 200-point plateau, yet no one has approached either mark in the three decades since the league’s high-scoring peak.
Modern defensive systems and the absence of the expansion-era talent dilution that once inflated numbers make McDavid’s pace especially striking. Still, 10 games constitute only a fraction of the campaign.
A prolonged slump, injury or simple regression toward the mean could render the projection a historical footnote rather than a record.
Oilers teammate Leon Draisaitl, no stranger to elite production himself, has already described the start as something that “just not real.”
What elevates the numbers beyond raw volume is the company and the context. McDavid has recorded at least one point in every game, including three five-point outings already—an early-season concentration matched in the modern era only by Lemieux.
He has done so while the Oilers, under new coach Mike Babcock, have themselves raced out of the gate.
The parallel to Gretzky is unavoidable and has been drawn since McDavid entered the league as a teenager; the present stretch is the closest statistical echo yet.
Whether the production proves sustainable or not, it has already rewritten the early-season ledger and reminded observers that the distance between McDavid and the rest of the league can still widen in ways that feel borrowed from another generation.
For now the season remains young, and the record books remain provisional.
Yet the first 10 games have already supplied a reminder of how rare true historical company is in the NHL, and how completely one player can still dominate the conversation when the numbers align.
