BREAKING NEWS: Connor McDavid Wins Ted Lindsay Award For The 5th Time — Only Gretzky Has Done This.
BREAKING NEWS: Connor McDavid Wins Ted Lindsay Award For The 5th Time — Only Gretzky Has Done This.
BREAKING NEWS: Connor McDavid Wins Ted Lindsay Award For The 5th Time — Only Gretzky Has Done This. And As The Hockey World Celebrates Another Historic Milestone, One Question Refuses To Go Away: Is Connor McDavid Simply Following In Wayne Gretzky’s Footsteps—Or Building A Legacy That Will One Day Stand Beside Hockey’s Greatest Icon?
Conor McDavid just wrote his name into a conversation that almost no one in the history of professional hockey has ever been allowed to enter. Not a conversation about great seasons. Not a conversation about dominant stretches or memorable playoff runs. A conversation about legacy, about what it means to define an era so completely that the people working hardest to stop you are the same ones standing up to honor you.
On Sunday, McDavid claimed the Ted Lindseay Award for the fifth time in his career. Five. And the only other player in NHL history who can say the same thing is Wayne Gretzky. Let that sit for a moment before we go any further. Because this is not a footnote. This is not an awards show moment that fades by Monday morning.
This is a 29-year-old man planting his flag on the same mountain as the greatest hockey player who ever lived and doing it in an era that was specifically designed to make what he does impossible. The Ted Lindseay Award does not work like other trophies. It is not determined by a panel of reporters sitting in press boxes.
There is no broadcast committee debating narrative arcs or marketability. The ballot goes directly to the players. Every active member of the NHL players association gets a vote. The left wing who has been assigned to shadow McDavid in every zone. The defensive pair that spent an entire game trying to wall him off from the net. The goalender who faced him twice in 30 days and went back to film study both times looking for something, anything that might tip the odds slightly more in his favor.
These are the people deciding this award. And the reason that matters is because their vote is not theoretical. It is not based on highlight reels or box scores reviewed from a distance. It is based on lived experience, on the specific, deeply personal understanding of what it costs to compete against someone at his level. When those men cast their ballots and McDavid’s name keeps rising to the top, that is not admiration.
That is testimony. He is 29 years old and he has earned that testimony five times. The previous four came in 2016 to 17, 2017 to 18, 2020 to 21, and 2022 to 23. Spread across nearly a decade, each win arrived in a different chapter of his career. Different teammates, different coaching staffs, different versions of the league trying to find new ways to contain him. None of it worked.
The vote kept coming back the same way because whatever adjustments were made, whatever systems were constructed around slowing him down, McDavid found a way to render them secondary. Not occasionally, consistently, year after year, at a level that eventually stopped feeling like peak performance and started feeling like a baseline.
This past season was the latest and perhaps most vivid example of what that baseline looks like. Over the full 82 game schedule, McDavid finished with 138 points, 48 goals, 90 assists. He led every skater in the National Hockey League in scoring, and he did it without a particularly soft schedule or an unusually forgiving stretch of opponents.
He led Edmonton to a second place finish in the Pacific Division. 41 wins, 30 losses, 11 overtime losses, 93 points. A team that on its best nights looks like a genuine contender and on its hardest nights looks like a franchise being carried on the back of one extraordinary human being. But the number that stopped people mid-con conversation this season was not the final point total. It was the streak.
From December 4th through January 13th, McDavid recorded a point in 20 consecutive games. 46 points across those 20 contests, 19 goals and 27 assists in a six-week window against the best defensive competition the NHL offers. To put that in context, that is not just a player getting hot at the right time.
That is a sustained, unrelenting demonstration of offensive command that reminded the entire league in real time why the gap between McDavid and everyone else still exists. There were nights during that run where opposing coaches had no answer. Where every defensive decision was correct and it still was not enough.
Where the only honest reaction was to acknowledge that some talent operates above the ceiling of conventional strategy. He finished ahead of Nikita Kusharov in the voting this year. Kusharov is a two-time winner of this award himself. A player of rare brilliance who in most other seasons would be a front runner, not a runnerup.
He also finished ahead of Mlin Celibbrini, the young San Jose Shark star who has captivated the league with his emergence and already carries the weight of franchise expectations at an age where most players are still finding their footing. Topping either name on this ballot would be noteworthy. Topping both along with the rest of the field is a reminder that the conversation about McDavid’s standing in the current NHL is not really a debate anymore.
It is a formality that the results keep confirming. and the Ted Lindseay Award is not even the only major individual honor surrounding his name right now. McDavid is also a heart trophy finalist this season. The MVP award as voted by the Professional Hockey Writers Association. He has taken home that trophy three times before.
A fourth heart alongside a fifth Ted Lindseay in the same spring would push his personal trophy case into territory that statistical analysts genuinely struggle to project forward because there is no modern template for what he is accumulating. The closest reference point is Gretzky, and invoking that name is not something the hockey world does casually or carelessly.
When McDavid addressed the award after receiving it, the part that resonated most had nothing to do with the statistics. He spoke about what it means to be recognized by the players he faces every night. The ones who battle him, who study him, who have every professional incentive to diminish what he does, and yet keep arriving at the same conclusion with their votes.
He said that kind of recognition means more than almost anything else the sport can offer. It is not a difficult sentiment to understand. Every other form of individual acknowledgement in professional hockey carries some layer of subjectivity, editorial judgment, narrative preference, the weight of market size or team performance.
The Ted Lindseay Award carries none of that. It is purely the verdict of the competition. Raw, unfiltered, and completely immune to outside influence. Five times the men who know the truth of what Conor McDavid is have told it plainly. Five times they looked at every candidate across the entire league and said the same name. Wayne Gretzky reached that number across a career that redefined what hockey could look like.
McDavid has reached it at 29 with years still ahead of him in an era that was supposed to make individual dominance at this scale nearly impossible. The players have voted. The record books have updated. And somewhere in the long unbroken line of hockey history, a new entry has been made. One that only two names will ever share.
