12 games into the 2026–27 NHL season, Connor McDavid has 34 points and the numbers don’t even tell half the full story of how phenomenal he has been on the ice this year.
The Oilers captain has eight goals and 26 assists through his first 12 games, which works out to just under three points per game, and the implications of that rate are otherworldly.
Only four players in NHL history have ever reached 30 points through their first 10 games of a season including Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Mike Bossy, and now McDavid. Lemieux still holds the all-time record with 37 points through his first 10 games back in 1988–89, and McDavid finished that same stretch with 31, but no player had reached the 30-point mark in 10 games since Lemieux did it in 1995–96.
He also became the fastest player in NHL history to record 20 assists in a single season, reaching that mark in just nine games, and of his first 23 assists this season, 18 were primary, meaning he delivered the pass directly before the goal rather than the pass before that. McDavid’s current 20 primary assists in 12 games are also double those of the next closest player in the league (Adam Fox who has 10).
The Oilers captain also wrote another two records to his name with the game on Monday.
Connor McDavid’s pace projections are crazy to look at
At 2.83 points per game over an 84-game season, McDavid is on pace to finish with somewhere around 238 points. Go ahead and read that again if you need to.
Wayne Gretzky’s single-season record, which has stood since 1985–86 and is the kind of number most people assumed would simply exist forever, untouched, is 215 points. McDavid’s current trajectory would hypothetically surpass it by more than 20 points, and that is after two games in which he picked up a combined three points, which is actually below his average right now.
The assists projection is similarly hard to process. Gretzky’s record of 163 assists in a single season has also stood since 1985–86, and McDavid is currently averaging 2.17 assists per game, which projects to around 182 over a full season.
It is worth being upfront here that these are projections on 12 games, and no player in the modern NHL has come close to sustaining anything like this across a full season. McDavid’s own career-high is 153 points from the 2022–23 season, when he put up 64 goals and 89 assists, and that was already considered one of the finest individual seasons the modern game had seen. What he is doing right now is running well above even that, which only speaks for how good his start to the 2026–27 season has been.
Breaking records, records breaking
McDavid has already become the fastest player in NHL history to record 20 assists in a single season, having gotten there in nine games. He broke Gretzky’s Oilers franchise record for points through the first 10 games of a season, a record Gretzky had set in 1984–85 and which had presumably felt quite safe until recently.
And by reaching 30 points through his first 10 games, he became only the fourth player in league history to do so, joining a group that had been closed for 30 years.
He has also now recorded an assist in each of his first 12 games of the season, matching the longest season-opening assist streak in NHL history. In doing so, he joined an elite group of players who achieved the same feat: Sebastian Aho in 2018–19, Ken Linseman in 1985–86, and Wayne Gretzky in 1982–83.
Additionally, McDavid has set a new Edmonton Oilers franchise record by racking up 34 points before November 1 after his sole assist against the Red Wings on Monday.
Cracking the top 10 single-season scoring totals in NHL history would require McDavid to finish with at least 165 points, enough to slip ahead of Gretzky’s 1980–81 campaign. Gretzky holds eight of those top 10 spots and Lemieux the other two, so simply appearing on that list at all would be a notable thing for any player from this era.
Gretzky’s biggest records are live conversations for the rest of this year
The most immediately trackable milestone still ahead is Gretzky’s record of reaching 100 points in 34 games, set during the 1983–84 season. At McDavid’s current pace, he would be approaching that mark sometime in the second week of December, and hitting it would make him only the second player in NHL history to do so.
Further along, Gretzky’s single-season assists record of 163 comes into view as arguably the more reachable of the two big benchmarks, since McDavid is averaging 2.17 assists per game and projecting to around 182, and the assists number depends a little less on his shooting percentage staying where it is.
The points record of 215 sits higher but is still well within the range McDavid’s current pace maps to at around 238. Both have stood for four decades and both have generally been treated as records that simply do not get broken.
For those who want a slightly less dizzying number to follow along with, there is also the top-10 all-time target at 165 points. It requires McDavid to have a genuinely historic season and at the moment it looks like the floor of what he might do rather than the ceiling.
The honest caveat underneath all of this is that his career-high going into this season was 153 points, and he has never come close to the pace he is on right now over a full year. Something will probably slow down. The question is just how much, and that is what the next 72 games are for.
McDavid’s production is built on primary assists
What keeps McDavid’s production from looking like a statistical fluke is the way it is being built. His 26.7 shooting percentage across 12 games is elevated and will likely come down as the season goes on, but the assists are harder to dismiss. 26 assists (20 primary assists) in 12 games means he is consistently putting teammates in positions to score and not only drifting near the play and collecting secondary points when goals happen nearby.
The Carolina game from earlier this month was a good illustration of how this looks in practice. Edmonton beat the Hurricanes 6–5 in a shootout, and McDavid factored into all five of Edmonton’s regulation goals, finishing with two of his own and three assists.
He tied the game with 1:28 left in the third period, which is the kind of thing that gets easier to do when you have been doing it your whole career and harder to explain when someone asks how. Draisaitl, who has been watching this from a few feet away for years now, summed it up about as well as anyone: “What do you want me to say? It’s just not real.”
Next 72 games are going to be so worth following
The Oilers are 8–2–2 through 12 games. Even if the last two games, a regulation loss to Toronto and a shootout loss to Detroit, served as a mild reminder that neither McDavid nor the Oilers are completely immune to a bad night, things are looking like it’s going to be a season to remember.
Sustaining this pace over 72 more games is a tall order, and anyone telling you otherwise is probably just excited, which is fair, but still. McDavid has been the league’s top scorer six times and has not had a season below 90 points since his rookie year, so the baseline expectation for him is already unusually high.
What this start has done is push the question past whether he is the best player in the game (Obviously, he is) and toward something like just how good he can get, and whether the records that have defined the ceiling of the sport for the last 40 years are actually as permanent as everyone assumed.
At 29, McDavid is at the age where most forwards are peaking or just past it, and the people around him keep noting that his game has gotten more complete without him losing any of the qualities that made him special to begin with. Whether this season ends at 150 points or somewhere closer to 200, the first 12 games have made one thing pretty clear: it is going to be worth watching.
Photo by Curtis Comeau/Icon Sportswire
