NHL 2030: Oilers’ McDavid, Draisaitl expected to lead league into next decade

On Wednesday, Daily Faceoff’s Paul Pidutti published a list titled NHL 2030, aiming to predict how the league’s top 30 will shape up in five years. Leon Draisaitl nabbed the 23rd spot from the Edmonton Oilers while, unsurprisingly, Connor McDavid came in at number one. Amongst the crop of named defencemen, Evan Bouchard was given an honourable mention.

Come the start of the 2030-31 season, Draisaitl will be in his mid-30s and entering the sixth year of his eight-year, $112 million contract with the Oilers. Despite his age creeping up on him, Pidutti sees him as the kind of player who can still be a difference maker late in his career:

Fresh off an MVP runner-up finish and breezy Rocket Richard Trophy, let’s not write Draisaitl’s obituary just yet. But he’ll be weeks shy of his 35th birthday in 2030, and the aging curve waits for no one. Fellow proven playoff performer and co-superstar extraordinaire Malkin still contributed around a point-per-game clip by his mid-30s, but had fallen outside top-10 forward chatter. Full credit to Draisaitl for being in this conversation ahead of what would be his 17th season.

McDavid, meanwhile, will be 33 in five years, and there’s no reason to believe he’ll be slowing down much. Pidutti identified Sidney Crosby as another great of the game whose trajectory McDavid will likely match, while writing why he’ll still be top of the crop come 2030:

Being the 7th-greatest forward in NHL history at age 28 has some perks. For our purposes, it’s that your margin for decline on the current field is massive. In a blah season by his standards – missing 15 games, getting fewer pucks on net, a short offseason – McDavid scored at a 122-point pace, added 33 playoff points, and scored the overtime winner in his best-on-best debut internationally.

How much speed would McDavid need to lose to just become very fast versus unparalleled fast with the puck? How much would his vision and hands need to decline after averaging more than an assist per game for a decade to become just an extremely good setup man? McDavid’s physical tools are so advanced that his physical decline, which has likely already begun, should allow him to preserve #1 status for years to come. Whether that’s still true at 33 in 2030 is equally a function of how fast the next generation develops to catch the man that brought hockey’s evolution to a new level.

There’s no denying there’s something special with what Draisaitl and McDavid are doing in Edmonton right now. And there’s no denying what they’re capable of late into their careers. Of course, for the Oilers, that just means even more motivation to get McDavid locked in for as long as possible, to secure great hockey in Edmonton for years to come.

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