He's the best player in the world. And still only 25.

Connor McDavid is coming off a career-high season, posting a mind-boggling 123 points in 80 games during the 2021-22 campaign. He's already won two Hart Trophies—given to the NHL's MVP—and with most of his career ahead of him, the Oilers captain is primed to dominate the game of hockey for the next decade.

It'd be hard for anyone to knock off Wayne Gretzky as the GOAT in hockey, but could McDavid end his career on hockey's Mount Rushmore?

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Oilers Will Greatly Benefit from NHL’s Expected Rise in Salary Cap

We posed that question to Bleacher Report's NHL staff this week and gauged their thoughts on No. 97's credentials for hockey's four immortals.

 

All Connor McDavid Needs Is a Stanley Cup to Enter the Pantheon of Greats

This question is an easy one for the staff’s resident Oilers fanatic.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. But with a caveat.

Given his accomplishments to this point, McDavid will certainly be remembered as one of the game’s all-time great talents even if he were to walk into general manager Ken Holland’s office today and announce his retirement.

Still, such a conversation is unlikely, regardless of how much fans in Calgary might want that.

But if No. 97 wants to level up to chiseled granite status alongside Gretzky, Howe and Orr, it’ll take at least one more piece of hardware on a mantel crammed with Hart and Art Ross Trophies.

The Stanley Cup.

Rightly or wrongly, there’s a hierarchy of great players in every sport that begins and ends with their championship status. If you put up numbers but never got a ring, you’re not privy to the conversations had among those who cradled a trophy or, in hockey’s case, hoisted a chalice.