Shocker.<\/p>\n
The best player on the Edmonton Oilers<\/a> was the best player on Team Canada Thursday in their Olympic Games debut.<\/p>\n Connor McDavid<\/a> made his presence felt early, drawing an early power play in the first period and notching three assists and a team-high six shots on net as the Canadians rolled past Czechia 5-0.<\/p>\n McDavid helped put Canada on the board late in the first period, setting up Macklin Celebrini, then put the game on ice by sending a perfect saucer pass to Nathan MacKinnon to make it 4-0 on a power play and sending a nice feed to Nick Suzuki to make it 5-0.<\/p>\n This comes as no surprise to Oilers teammate Zach Hyman, who fully expected his captain to stand out even among the best players in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cAny room he\u2019s in, he has the skill set that is just elite and above,\u201d said Hyman. \u201cOn Team Canada, everybody has an elite skill set but the way I\u2019d put it is if you watch our skate everybody kind of looks the same but there is one guy who looks different. That\u2019s him. And no matter what room or what ice surface you put him on, that is always going to be the case.\u201d<\/p>\n The Oilers captain, who\u2019s been waiting his whole career for this tournament, led all forwards in ice time at 18:04 on a line with Celebrini and Tom Wilson.<\/p>\n Leon Draisaitl, Josh Samanski and Team Germany will take on Denmark later this afternoon.<\/p>\n E-mail:\u00a0rtychkowski@postmedia.com<\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don\u2019t miss the news you need to know \u2014 add EdmontonJournal.com<\/a> and EdmontonSun.com<\/a> to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.<\/a><\/p>\n You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton Journal<\/a> | The Edmonton Sun.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shocker. The best player on the Edmonton Oilers was the best player on Team Canada Thursday in their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5125],"tags":[19,155,9439,198,146,5300,5,7154,370,3041,501,517,4,975,24,3037,9846,55436,280,1585],"class_list":{"0":"post-456564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton-oilers","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-connor-mcdavid","10":"tag-czech-republic","11":"tag-edmonton","12":"tag-edmonton-oilers","13":"tag-edmontonoilers","14":"tag-hockey","15":"tag-josh-samanski","16":"tag-leon-draisaitl","17":"tag-lukas-dostal","18":"tag-macklin-celebrini","19":"tag-nathan-mackinnon","20":"tag-nhl","21":"tag-nick-suzuki","22":"tag-oilers","23":"tag-team-canada","24":"tag-team-germany","25":"tag-the-milano-santagiulia-ice-hockey-arena","26":"tag-tom-wilson","27":"tag-zach-hyman"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116061988671235529","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}