McDavid Ties Oates With 18th Straight Assist Game as Draisaitl's Double Lifts Oilers Past Canucks 4-2

Some nights the box score tells you everything you need to know, and Saturday night at Rogers Place was one of them. Leon Draisaitl scored twice. Connor McDavid assisted three times. The Edmonton Oilers beat the Vancouver Canucks 4-2. And somewhere in the middle of it all, McDavid quietly tied a piece of history that has stood for more than three decades.

The captain's three helpers stretched his season-opening point streak to 18 games, and with it his assist streak to 18 as well, matching Adam Oates' run from 1992-93 for the second-longest assist streak in NHL history. Only Wayne Gretzky's 23-game streak from 1990-91 sits ahead of him now. McDavid leads the league with 47 points — 10 goals and 37 assists — and he has found the scoresheet in every game Edmonton has played this season.

It was not, though, a comfortable night. Mattias Ekholm opened the scoring for the Oilers in the first period, but Max Sasson tied it with nine seconds left in the frame, and the Canucks went into the dressing room believing they had a game. They did, for a while. Then the third period arrived, and Edmonton did what Edmonton does. Jason Dickinson regained the lead 49 seconds into the final frame, sweeping in a backhand on his second rebound attempt. Less than three minutes later, McDavid sent the puck across to Draisaitl, and the German unleashed his patented one-timer from the bottom of the right circle for a 3-1 lead on the power play. Brock Boeser pulled one back at 17:25, but Draisaitl sealed it with an empty-net goal with 45 seconds left — his 16th of the season, tying Minnesota's Kirill Kaprizov for the league lead.

"I thought they played a good game. I thought we played really well, too," Levi said afterwards, and he had earned the right to enjoy it. The goaltender made 20 saves in his return to the lineup after missing seven games with a lower-body injury. "I love playing those games, going into the third period 1-1 knowing that I'm probably going to have to come up with one or two. Love it, man. So it was a fun game."

The win snapped a modest two-game slide for the Oilers, who sit at 12-3-3 and atop the Pacific Division. There was a scare, too — Ryan Nugent-Hopkins left 45 seconds into the second period after taking a puck to the head off a shot by teammate Ryan Shea, and there were immediate fears of a broken jaw. Head coach Mike Babcock said afterwards he did not expect the veteran to miss much time.

For Vancouver, the numbers are getting harder to look at. The Canucks are 3-15-1, they have lost five straight, and they have managed just one victory in their last 16 games. Yet coach Manny Malhotra found positives in the effort. "There were a lot of real positives coming out of it, especially in the first two periods, in terms of just the overall effort that was put forth," he said. "The attention to detail was there and because of that, we were in a situation going into the third where we had an opportunity to win."

That is the cruel part of playing Edmonton right now. You can do almost everything right for 40 minutes, and then the best player in the world finds the best goal-scorer in the league, and the game is gone. Edmonton hosts the New York Rangers on Monday. Vancouver, meanwhile, keeps searching for a way out of a season that is slipping away before it has truly begun.