After the Edmonton Oilers won the 2015 NHL draft lottery, even the most optimistic Oilers fans would have said that expecting No. 1 overall pick Connor McDavid to become the best scorer in the NHL by age 20 was setting the bar too high.
And yet, McDavid has exploded in his second season, leading the NHL with 88 points and carrying the Oilers into playoff position for the first time since 2005-06, when they lost in the Stanley Cup finals to the Carolina Hurricanes.
No doubt he is having a fantastic season, and Edmonton fans are getting everything they could have dreamed of. But since before McDavid was even a thought for the Oilers, the former Erie Otter was touted as the next generational player -- the next Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux or Sidney Crosby.
Is he already showing signs of being that good? Does his trajectory compare to the all-time greats? How does it match up against the best players of the most recent era?
Going beyond raw point totals
If we look only at point totals, McDavid's age-20 season currently ranks 18th all time with seven games left. If he scores at his 1.17-points-per-game rate for the final stretch of the season, he will end up with 96 points, which would push him up to 12th place, just ahead of Jaromir Jagr.
But the raw point totals don't accurately tell the story for two reasons: Not every player with an all-time great age-20 season played all 82 games, and the league has changed significantly since Gretzky had the greatest age-20 season of all time, with 164 points.
During the 1980-81 season, in which The Great One potted 55 goals and added 109 assists, the NHL set the highest mark since the 1943-44 season for goals per game, with the average game featuring 8.02 goals. This season, teams are producing just 5.54 goals per game, or 31 percent fewer per contest.
Goal scoring has fluctuated in the 10 seasons since the likes of Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin entered the league (and had magnificent age-20 seasons). In Ovechkin's rookie season, he posted the sixth-highest point total for a 20-year-old forward in history, with 106 points. However, the league produced 6.16 goals per game, 11 percent higher than this season's rate.
There are two ways we can adjust for the differences in era. One is to look at Hockey Reference's point shares metric, which indicates how many standings points each player's production was worth. The other method is to adjust the player's scoring by the difference in league average between the two seasons.
By the first measure, Gretzky's age-20 season is still the best of all time, but McDavid isn't that far off in the distance:
A couple of things to note about this chart: Eric Lindros' season would have ranked higher had he played a full season. The Flyers legend scored 97 points in 65 games. Crosby's production was also limited by injury, but Sid managed 72 points in just 53 games. For those wondering how Rob Brown got on the list, remember that his age-20 season was aided by Lemieux's all-time-great 199-point season in 1988-89.
There are more complex adjustments that can be made to historical numbers, like factoring for roster size and schedule length, but to keep our comparison simple, we can tweak the numbers to today's league averages and project them over 82 games to give us a clearer picture of which star had the best age-20 scoring season:
Back in the days of Gretzky and Lemieux (and even in Lindros' early years), the NHL didn't track many metrics outside of power-play scoring, so it's more challenging to determine which players had the biggest overall impact on their teams. But we can look at those numbers for 20-year-olds since 2007-08.
Power-play scoring can shade players' totals, to make their season appear better or worse than it actually was. In the case of McDavid, his age-20 season is among the best at even strength since 2007-08. He is currently producing 2.85 points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, which is No. 1 in the NHL among players with more than 60 games played. However, it isn't close to Crosby's age-20 season, when Sid scored 3.28 points per 60 even-strength minutes, easily the best rate in the NHL.
Crosby's age-20 underlying numbers are also superior. When McDavid has been on the ice this season, the Oilers are creating 6.6 more shot attempts per 60 minutes and allowing 1.5 fewer attempts against than when he is off. Sid created 12.7 attempts for his team while allowing 0.2 more.
So McDavid's age-20 season might not be on the same level as Crosby's, but the fact that it's even in the ballpark tells us a lot about his future.
Projecting his peak
McDavid is still several years away from his scoring peak. Both Crosby's and Gretzky's best season in terms of points-per-game rate came at age 23. Lemieux scored at his highest rate when he was 27, and Ovechkin was 25 when he netted his career high.
How much could McDavid's production jump? From Gretzky's age-20 season to his peak, he saw an increase in points per game of 26 percent (from 2.05 to 2.77), Crosby bumped up 16 percent, Lemieux 34 percent and Ovechkin 14 percent.
Decreased overall scoring rates will likely lead to less of an increase in McDavid's scoring than players from the '80s and '90s, but if the young superstar matches Crosby and Ovechkin and adds 15 percent to his totals, he will score around 110 points per 82 games at his peak. The last player to score 110 points or more was Canucks star Henrik Sedin in 2009-10.
Some part of McDavid's future success, whether it's points or raising a Stanley Cup, will rest on whether the Oilers can continue to build around him. Edmonton is a mediocre team outside of their 20-year-old center. When McDavid is on the ice, the Oilers score 61.6 percent of the total goals, but only 48.0 percent when he is off. En route to the Stanley Cup last season, the Penguins scored 53.0 percent of total goals when Crosby was off the ice, so he had significant help.
With a generational franchise player in place, the Oilers should be able to continue to add pieces to help McDavid as he ascends. He might not reach any of Gretzky's records, but McDavid's production as a 20-year-old, and underlying statistics, point directly to the youngster becoming everything he was projected to be.