I don’t want to derail the thread but I’ll respectfully disagree and leave it at this:
In the NBA there’s no possibility of having a team with arguably the two best players in the world yet they’re a playoff failure year after year. That’s what the Oilers are. At worst you could say the Oilers have two of the top 5 players in the league and that doesn’t change my point at all. In the NBA if a team had two of Jokic, Giannis, Steph, Tatum, or Luka, they would win the title. My assumption is you don’t follow basketball which is totally fine. But compared to hockey it’s a totally different framework for how to construct a team and if you have stars you succeed. Thats not necessarily the case in the NHL. Hockey is the ultimate team game where depth is more important than high end talent at the top of the roster.
The simple fact that someone like Mahomes wins championships and McDavid doesn’t is another easy argument against his influence compared to other team sport athletes. I’m not saying he’s a worse athlete, he just happens to play a sport where his influence can’t compare to theirs. Hockey is the big 4 sport where its stars have the least influence on the game relative to other stars in other sports.
You're right that individual superstars have an outsized effect in NBA basketball ... but then what does it tell when McDavid has an injury and isn't nearly as effective that the NHL team he's on goes from like a 109 point team to bottom 3 in the league?
I think Draisaitl is a really good player, but where was he when McDavid was hurting? You have to wonder how much McDavid drives even his offense, because what was his excuse? He wasn't hurt.
You're wrong in saying I don't watch a lot of basketball, I know the sport very well, have played it at a high level because I was pretty good at it (hockey was my first love though).
When McDavid has long stretches of prime Gretzky like numbers, not just figuratively, like *literally* this would be like an NBA player in today's era putting up *literal* Wilt Chamberlain like stretches of stupid/crazy numbers like when Wilt was averaging 50 ppg a season. Imagine a player in today's NBA having long stretches of 40+ ppg while being the most spectacular, electric player to play ... ESPN and the US media's heads would explode, Nike would have commercials with that player 24/7.
In fact there is an analog to McDavid in the NBA and I think it was Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan didn't win championships until later in his career (age 28 in 1991 I believe) because the Bulls were a tire fire organization that didn't give him a fair chance to win against the Bad Boy Pistons and he had no where near the help Bird and Magic had. What happens when he got even one reliable no.2 option in Pippen? He wins 6 titles in 6 full seasons.
McDavid actually reminds me a lot of that. He's clearly the greatest talent the sport has, people used to push the whole "Bird and Magic are better than Jordan! Jordan doesn't make his team better!" bull shit, the truth was always that his management group didn't load his rosters up the way the Lakers and Celtics did. Bird knew by '86 when he compared Jordan to basically (well) God.
And even for Jordan, when he first retired in 1993, did the Bulls instantly go from a top team to a nothing team? No, they weren't as good clearly, but they were still a solid playoff team without him. The Nuggets wouldn't instantly drop to a bottom 3 team if Jokic was hurt for a stretch of the season. NFL QB is the only position where the position has such an outsized effect on a team that you can't really compare, but even there, would anyone say the Chiefs are a poorly built NFL team that just rely on Mahomes to carry them? The Chiefs have a good roster even without him (7 Pro Bowl players a year ago), they have one of the best defenses in the NFL, which Mahomes has no impact on.
