Why can’t McDavid elevate players? It’s fair to criticize the Oilers for not surrounding MVP winners Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl with enough offensive talent. But at some point, I feel that the blame must lie with McDavid himself. Sometimes winning teams are built with superior scoring depth, and sometimes… have you thought about the 2008-2009 Penguins lately?

For a while, including for a Stanley cup win, it was comical how Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin managed to lead productive teams with an utterly unproductive supporting cast. This, after all, is the purpose of Mark Donk. The most used line combination from that team was Kunitz-Crosby-Guerin. Kunitz is perhaps a bit too good to get lumped into this category – he was perfectly decent in Anaheim. In 5 years there he averaged 0.26 goals and 0.61 points per game. In his first 5 years in Pittsburgh, he put up 0.37 goals and 0.80 points per game. There’s various ways to break this down and adjust this, but the broad overview should be good enough to show how much Crosby elevated him. Bill Guerin is a solid “hall of very good” player who was near the end of his career in Pittsburgh. After not hitting 60 points since the 2004 season in Dallas, Guerin bounced around several teams before being traded to Pittsburgh at the 2009 trade deadline. His numbers speak for themselves: 58 point regular season pace, and a career best playoff run from a veteran who played on the ’90s Devils teams.

Who did Crosby play with, besides Mark Donk? Connor Sheary is the funniest example to look at. The undrafted FA put up 23 goals and 53 points on Crosby’s wing, signed a large enough contract to set his family up for life, and fell out of relevance in Buffalo and Washington. Pascal Dupuis was a popular Crosby linemate. Dupuis was functionally on his way out of the league at the 2008 trade deadline. He scored just 20 points in a disastrous 79 games across two years in Atlanta, and was a dump piece in the Marian Hossa trade. Dupuis showed some flashes after getting moved to Pittsburgh: he scored 18, 17, 25, and 20 goals in Pittsburgh after topping 15 goals just once before. Random examples exist at even the lowest scoring levels – see Tyler Kennedy’s 5 consecutive 10 goal seasons in Pittsburgh. He was traded to San Jose for a 2nd round pick and never scored 10 goals in a year again.

The most talented wing that Crosby and Malkin shared ice with before Phil Kessel came along was James Neal, who scored 40 goals and 81 points in Pittsburgh (almost entirely on Malkin’s wing – Crosby missed most of that season) and who’s career high outside of that system was 31 and 58. He’s a good player – let’s say clearly that “good” means “was a top 6 wing without a generational center boosting him up”. Kunitz was good. Phil Kessel was really good, of course, but he didn’t come to Pittsburgh until Crosby was in 28, so I don’t want to count him in a McDavid comparison. Evander Kane is good. Patric Hornqvist and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins are about the bare minimum to get sorted with the good players, based on the mediocre stats that RNH put up in the 5 years he had before McDavid and Draisaitl. Jordan Eberle should count after this year. Zach Hyman is, let’s call him borderline, but it makes sense to me that he’s excelling with McDavid – he’s one of the few “gritty” players in this sport who’s skating speed can keep up with McD (fact check Hyman speed?). So that’s 3 actual good wings that Crosby has played with, and 3.5 for McDavid. The individual scoring leader among this group from when they didn’t play for the Penguins or Oilers? James Neal has Evander Kane beat by exactly 1 goal and 1 point.

I look at Connor McDavid’s supporting cast – decent names like Jordan Eberle and Milan Lucic, worse names like Benoit Pouliot and Zack Kassian – and I don’t see a whole lot worse than Kunitz, Dupuis, Hornqvist. So what are Edmonton’s issues? The logical scapegoat is the goalies or the defense, and to be clear, those have both been pretty bad. The Oilers do not have a Fleury or Letang quality player at those positions. But something should be said for the way that Crosby and Malkin elevated the mediocrity around them, and the extent to which McDavid and Draisaitl have been unable to.