“Well, I like that he’s plus-19, so that would be my focus,” he said.
“I just think he’s a really good player, but what is better is that he’s a better person, a better man, and he drives his teammates by what he does, not by what he says, because we get confused with leadership. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. It’s what you model each and every day, and he does it right.”
McDavid has been a fixture alongside Leon Draisaitl and Vasily Podkolzin this season, getting some extended run time beside one of his longest-tenured teammates in the German, while the Russian has settled in as the heavy lifter on the forecheck for the line and is enjoying his own career-best start on the unit with the Dynamic Duo.
Having some extended time alongside Draisaitl has been something new for him this season, and being able to tap into the talents of the German & the rest of his regular counterparts like Evan Bouchard, Mattias Ekholm and Vasily Podkolzin is somethign he believes is a major factor to his success.
“I think Leo and I always thought that when we did play together, it was kind of just a one-off or just a situation where we needed to find a goal, and we knew it wasn’t necessarily a long-term thing,” McDavid said. “So to be able to have a stretch of games playing together, who knows what happens moving forward. But playing together has been so much fun.
“Obviously Podzy as well, Ekky and Bouch, I’ve said it all along that being out there with those five guys, everybody knows where each other are. Everybody’s reading off each other, playing fast, and everyone can make a play. It’s a pretty fun group to be a part of.