Last weekend while the All-Star festivities were going on, Sportsnet aired "Connor McDavid: Whatever It Takes," a documentary which followed McDavid through his potentially career ending injury he took on April 6th 2019, and the journey of his rehabilitation process.
The entire piece is a wonderful doc which not only gives the fans a look behind the curtain, but does much to show who Connor McDavid is as an individual.
For those who haven't seen it yet, here is the short synopsis:
After being tripped by Mark Giordano on a breakaway, Connor McDavid crashed into the net, fully tearing his PCL. ACL injuries are far more common and the healing time is far quicker than PCL injuries, which usually are only partial tears because of how strong the PCL is. McDavid completely severed his PCL. Most surgeries involving the PCL can take up to a year to fully heal... if they ever are able to fully heal.
Instead of undergoing surgery, Connor McDavid instead went through a grueling rehabilitation process where he was doing therapy for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even as he was going through this process, there was no guarantee it was going to work. No athlete had ever attempted to do something like this.
We all know how this story ended. Connor McDavid played opening night against the Vancouver Canucks, scored the game winning goal in a way that was vintage McDavid, and now leads the league in points and is set for another career season.
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The documentary is very informative in terms of the rehab process but I found the entire thing more fascinating and educational by reading between the lines. Specifically on how Ken Holland handled the Oilers summer.
Holland became the Oilers new General Manager on May 6th... it wasn't until about a month after he was hired that he was informed how serious Connor McDavid's injury was. Through the months of June and July there was still a chance McDavid was going to need surgery, essentially guaranteeing he would miss the entire 2019/2020 season.
Now that we are equipped with that same information, Holland's moves this summer make even more sense.
Holland was dealing with a team that was ripped apart by the decisions of former GM Peter Chiarelli. Contracts such as the Manning, Russell, and Lucic deals were an anchor on the team leaving very little space to make any major adds.
Imagine for a moment, being Ken Holland, and a month before free agency and the draft, knowing all these other issues you need to try and fix, you hear that Connor McDavid might not be playing the season. How are you supposed to handle that?
How would Holland be able to talk the likes of Dzingel, Nyquist, and Connolly (to name a few) and entice them to sign with the Oilers knowing your biggest bargaining chip in Connor McDavid may not be able to play? If the worst happened and McDavid was out, it doesn't look good for the Oilers organization to have misled free agents and essentially wasted their year.
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I was under the impression that Holland made so many one year deals simply because of the cap issues the team was dealing with. Digger deeper now it is clear he was preparing for a worst case scenario and didn't want to hurt the team further spending bigger money on longer contracts.
Holland should be under more scrutiny with how he chooses to handle this trade deadline and then of course what he does in the off-season. It isn't fair to completely give Holland a free pass for his work last summer but with this new information at hand I find it difficult to overly criticize him. He tried to make the best of a bad decision and prepare for the worst case scenario which is what a good GM should do.
Considering where the Oilers find themselves in the standings I would say he made the right decision.