As the Edmonton Oilers finished off a 5-1 stomping of their provincial rival Calgary Flames on Tuesday night, and Connor McDavid finished off a jaw-dropping five-point performance, Jack Michaels dropped a line that really grabbed my attention:

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him better. I’ve seen every one of the games he’s played. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him play better than he has in December of 2025.”

The Oilers captain is on a pretty special run right now.

He’s now up to 31 points in December, a mark that clears any non-teammate by 13.

During this 12-game stretch, he has four different four-point games. To be putting up four or more points in 33 percent of your games during a 10+ game stretch in the National Hockey League is absolutely insane.

There have been 58 four-point performances in the entire NHL so far this season. McDavid accounts for nearly seven percent of them, and he’s got them all in the last 20 days.

There are a few things that have been apparent over this hot streak for McDavid, and one of them is that he’s finally getting back to being a volume shooter.

Back in November, McDavid’s shots per hour at both five-on-five and on the power play were the lowest that they had been since his rookie season. It was a wildly disappointing trend considering he came into training camp saying that he wanted to get back to being a goal scorer.

Well, he’s since corrected the course.

There have been 13 games this season where McDavid has registered five or more shots on goal in a game. Seven of those games have come in December.

If we look at his shots per hour at five-on-five on a game-to-game basis, his five highest shot volume games have all game in December, including a seven-shot game against the Seattle Kraken, which was the highest he’s had since November of 2024.

It is no coincidence that this uptick in scoring is directly tied to McDavid shooting the puck at an incredibly high volume. There is still room for him to go up, too.

His five-on-five shots per hour on the season is now up to 7.39, which matches the number he finished with last season but still sits lower than the number he finished with in each of the five seasons before that, including back in 2022-23 when he scored 64 goals and had a career high shots per hour of 9.59.

Shots on goal of course aren’t everything. This heater also lines up with McDavid being re-united with both Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman.

This is purely speculative on my part, but early in the season, when McDavid was spending a lot of time with the likes of Andrew Mangiapane and Matt Savoie, I wonder if he felt some pressure to get those players the puck a bit more in order to try and get their offensive games going a bit.

That could be why his shot numbers were down.

Whatever the reason, he’s back with Hyman and Nugent-Hopkins and the trio are back to being one of the most productive lines in the NHL.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he regained his shooting mentality once he got put back with two linemates that he clearly has a high level of trust in.

After going goalless through his first six games of the season and scoring just once in his first ten games of the season, McDavid is now on pace for 49 goals this season and looks like he’s fully capable of putting together his second career 50-goal campaign.

Here are some other notes on the Oilers’ offensive outburst and McDavid’s heater:

On Tuesday night, not only did McDavid register the first five-assist game of this season, but it’s the first one we’ve seen in the NHL since November 25th of last season when Brandon Hagel accomplished the feat.
Dating back to the start of the 2023-24 season, there have only been eight times where a player has produced five or more assists in a game. McDavid is now the only player to be on that list twice.
I mentioned that McDavid is now on pace for nearly 50 goals on the year. This hot streak has also put him on pace for 144 points on the year. If he can get there, it would be the second-highest total of his career.
There is a real chance that we’re talking about him pushing the 153-point mark, which is not only his career high but the most points a player has produced in a single season since Mario Lemieux in 1995-96.
He is now just 51 points away from hitting the 1200 point mark for his career, a number that only 53 players in the history of the league have gotten to.
After watching Sidney Crosby set the Penguins franchise record for points, I was curious how far McDavid is from passing Gretzky for most points in an Oilers sweater. The answer is 520. He’ll need to sign one more contract in Edmonton to get there.
The Oilers’ power play is running at an unconscious 40.4 percent so far this month, which clears the second-place Detroit Red Wings by a full six percent. They also lead the league with 17 power play goals in December, three more than any other team.
How about Ryan Nugent-Hopkins? Six points in his last four games and humming at north of a point per game this season. He’s also now just 12 games away from playing his 1,000th game for the Oilers and is just 50 games away from passing Kevin Lowe for the most games played in franchise history.

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