How many goals will Oilers’ Connor McDavid score in 2025-26?

McDavid averaged 11.5 shots per hour in 2022-23, the highest in his career. In total, he had 528 shot attempts that season, while never accumulating more than 481 in any other year of his career. Then, both his shot on goal and shot attempt rate decreased in the two following seasons, and so did his scoring rate. It’s no coincidence that his lowest-scoring season since 2017 was also the season in which he averaged the fewest shots per hour.

Fortunately, McDavid aims to shoot the puck a lot more in 2025-26.

“Listen, ultimately, I want to help this team win … and I’m happy playing the passer role. I’m always going to be that player,” he said. “But I’d like to be just a little bit more — not necessarily selfish — but assertive with my chances.”

“I have times where I get the puck in good spots and I’m thinking, ‘What’s the next play?’ When I should be thinking, ‘I’m going to score here, I’m going to shoot, or I’m going to take this to the net.’ That’s when my game is at its best.”

Still, McDavid’s decrease in shooting may not be the sole and only reason for his goal decline.

Not only was McDavid’s shot volume at its highest in 2022-23, but his finishing ability was also at its best that season. Going back to the data graphic above, note that McDavid scored 2.1 goals per hour on 1.6 expected goals per hour in 2022-23, which equates to a goals above expected rate of +0.5, the best of his career. But in the subsequent seasons, he scored fewer goals than expected.

What this means is that, even if you take into account McDavid’s lower shot volume, if McDavid’s scoring efficiency relative to his shot total was the same in 2023-24 and 2024-25, he would have scored about 1.8 and 1.7 goals per hour in those two seasons, respectively. If you do the math, that would have meant about ~16 more goals in each of the past two seasons, or a total of ~48 and ~42 goals, respectively.

As he acknowledged, perhaps McDavid made a conscious decision to be more pass-first in the last two seasons, which resulted in fewer shots and consequently a lower goal volume. But why did his finishing take such a hit?

One factor could certainly be injuries. Recall that McDavid suffered an upper-body injury at the beginning of 2023-24, and he was expected to miss 2-3 weeks. Dr. Harjas Grewal, a doctor who often comments on NHL injuries, speculated that McDavid had suffered an oblique strain, an injury that would make it difficult for him to shoot. However, McDavid came back to Edmonton’s lineup only about a week after his injury during Edmonton’s Heritage Classic Game, missing just two games in total, much fewer than expected.

Perhaps McDavid returned earlier because Edmonton was going through their worst start in franchise history at that moment, feeling the pressure to play, and/or perhaps that injury lingered throughout the season, affecting his play and, in particular, his shooting ability. Of course, that’s just speculation, but this theory is supported by the fact that McDavid’s goal-scoring saw a significant decrease, and at the end of the season, it was reported that McDavid had played through an abdominal injury in the playoffs. There’s solid evidence to suggest that injuries have certainly played some role. Note that McDavid also missed 14 games due to injury in 2024-25.

Another potential factor may be the power play. 

In 2022-23, Edmonton scored 13.3 goals per hour on the man-advantage, first in the NHL by a significant margin. In fact, no other team in the analytics era (post-2007) has scored more than 11.5 goals per hour on the PP. But, the Oilers declined to 10.6 in 2023-24 (2nd) and 9.0 in 2024-25 (10th).

Individually, McDavid scored 3.8 goals per hour on 3.1 expected goals per hour on the PP in 2022-23, but 1.6 goals on 2.3 expected goals per hour on the PP in 2023-24, a significant decrease of 1.4 goals above expected per hour. Thus, it is likely that the (relative) decline of Edmonton’s overall power-play has played some role here. I also believe that, especially over the past two seasons, the Oilers’ top PP unit set-up was much more optimized to make McDavid the passer and Draisaitl or Hyman the primary shooting threats, likely having an impact on McDavid’s finishing.

McDavid also had an 18.2 percent shooting percentage in 2022-23, the highest of his career. For reference, his career average is about 14.9 percent. So perhaps there was a tad bit of simple puck luck involved there as well.

Projecting how many goals Connor McDavid will score in 2025-26

Let’s say McDavid delivers on his word and takes more shots this season, perhaps around ~10.5-11 shots per hour and ~1.5 expected goals per hour. We’ll project it to be more than it has been in the past two seasons, but slightly less than his shooting rates from 2021-22 through 2022-23, just to be conservative. Then, let’s say McDavid’s finishing is around his career average finishing rate of ~0.1-0.2 goals above expected per hour. And finally, let’s assume that he plays a full 82 games. He’s averaged ~21:56 TOI per game in the past three seasons, so if we round it up to 22 TOI/GP for a nice and easy clean number, that means about 1804 total TOI over a full season.

Doing the math with all of these assumptions, this would equate to roughly ~48-51 projected goals. If McDavid is truly focused on shooting and scoring more, I think this is absolutely a reasonable estimate.

Of course, it does depend on many different factors going right, such as the hope that he remains fully healthy, not missing any games or playing any games through injuries. The Oilers also hired Paul McFarland as the new power-play coach this season after Glen Gulutzan – Edmonton’s PP coach from 2018-19 through 2024-25 – was hired by the Dallas Stars as their head coach; as such, it is difficult to precisely project how strong Edmonton’s PP could be in 2025-26, which will obviously have an impact on McDavid’s goal-scoring.

On the other hand, this estimate does use some conservative assumptions. Time and time again, we’ve witnessed McDavid accomplish various incredible feats, and I would not be surprised in the least if he exceeds that number and hits the 60+ goal mark again. You can never count him out.