Connor McDavid and the pursuit of becoming the third-fastest to 1,000 NHL points

After getting off to an uncharacteristically slow start to the season, Connor McDavid is back to producing at an otherworldly rate for the Edmonton Oilers.

McDavid picked up five points in the team’s 5-2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday, putting him at 53 points through 33 games on the season. That seems low for McDavid at a glance, but he’s been scoring nearly two points per game for more than a month now.

Back in November, the Oilers went on a three-game road trip through Vancouver, San Jose, and Seattle, and McDavid was held off of the scoresheet in each of the games, a drought that matched his career-high. That trip ultimately resulted in Jay Woodcroft getting fired and Kris Knoblauch taking over as head coach.

The Oilers had an up-and-down couple of weeks after the coaching change and then something clicked when they hammered the Capitals in Washington on Thanksgiving. Starting with that win, the Oilers have gone 14-3 and McDavid has 37 points across those 17 games.

If McDavid can continue scoring at that kind of clip the rest of the way, he could reach 1,000 points for his NHL career before the end of the season. McDavid became the fifth fastest in league history to reach 900 points during the win over Philly, and he’d become the third-fastest to 1,000 if he could do it by the end of 2023-24.

The two fastest to 1,000 NHL points were Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, who did so in 424 and 513 games respectively. The third-fastest, as it stands, is New York Islanders great Mike Bossy, who reached 1,000 points in his 656th game in the league. He just played his 602nd game in the NHL, so McDavid has 53 games left to beat Bossy.

McDavid is at 903 points,  97 needed to reach 1,000, and the Oilers have 47 games left in the season. Assuming he plays in all of those games, McDavid would need to score slightly over two points per game to reach the mark by the end of the season and edge out Bossy for third-fastest by a few games.

Scoring at a two-point-per-game clip for the entire latter half of an NHL season is undoubtedly a hell of a task, but if there’s one player who can go ahead and do that sort of thing, it’s McDavid.