Look, it’s not fair. I know that. You know that. The PLAYERS know that. It’s just the world we live in. Connor McDavid is the world’s fastest hockey player – with and without the puck. It’s stupid, even, how fast he is.
The fine people at Sportsnet did us a favor and finally gave us the goods on how fast McDavid was skating in the season opener. On a side note, speed of entry and acceleration are microstats I would LOVE to have for every player in the NHL. I think in the future when technology allows for this information we may find a greater level of correlation between speed in certain situations and goal scoring/shot attempts.
But back to McDavid, as you can imagine, he’s ridiculously fast. Early in the game he split the defense while handling the puck and the Oiler Captain topped out at 37 kilometers an hour. After watching it, Twitter was in total agreement that we have seen nothing like this in hockey before. There’s speed in practice or at an all-star competition and then there’s speed in game situations. This was happening live in game situations, with actual 200 pound NHL defenders trying to stop him.
Kilometers per hour is a weird unit of measurement for hockey. What does 37 kilometers an hour really mean? Well, for our American readers, that’s 22.99 miles per hour. Even that is weird. The rink is 200 feet long and travel is probably better measured in seconds than in hours.
37 kilometers an hour is 33.7 feet per second. If his pursuers could only top out at 35 kilometers per hour (and I’m not so sure they can) then they are moving at 31.9 feet per second. And that’s top speed, not even factoring how quickly McDavid accelerated to that speed versus his opposition. No matter how you want to figure it out, in the span of 5-6 seconds that it takes to get from one end of the rink to the other, McDavid could separate himself from his pursuers by 10 feet or more. That’s enough space to pull pretty much anything out of his hat.
On the second goal, however, McDavid topped out at 40.9 kilometers an hour. That’s 37.3 feet per second. Now on this one, McDavid stayed in a straight line and pushed the puck up the ice so he could skate without handling it. McDavid hit 40.9 kilometers an hour right before he got to the net AND THEN STOPPED INSTANTLY to deposit the puck past Smith. You can get whiplash if your car goes from 40 to 0 that quickly. As has been mentioned many times online, you can get a speeding ticket in a school zone for travelling 40 kilometers an hour.
Is it fair? No. It’s not fair.
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