Breaking: McDavid reportedly ill or injured.

McDavid has been sidelined.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 5 years ago
Breaking: McDavid reportedly ill or injured.
Damon Tarver/CSM/Zuma

This is the last thing the Edmonton Oilers' fan base wanted to hear.

According to an official report from the Oilers organization the team's top forward, Oilers' captain Connor McDavid, has been sidelined with some form of injury or illness. The announcement comes as part of a more general announcement regarding players on the Oilers roster who will be unable to attend the Oilers skill competition today due to either or illness and comes fresh off the heels of another loss for the Oilers on Saturday night. 

The Oilers welcomed the Arizona Coyotes to Rogers Place on Saturday and in spite of the fact that the Coyotes were playing with a very badly depleted roster of players, they managed to squeeze our a 3 - 2 victory over McDavid and the Oilers. If it is indeed an injury that McDavid has suffered there was no obvious moment in the game that appeared to leave him with any kind of lasting discomfort, so it's possible that this is related to illness and not injury. Additionally McDavid appeared somewhat sluggish in his post game interview after the loss to the Coyotes, although to be fair he could have merely been exhausted or discouraged from the loss, so if this is some kind of illness it may have begun creeping on him at some point yesterday. 

McDavid will not be the only player who misses the competition as mentioned before, joining him on the sidelines will be a fair number of Oilers' players including Jujhar Khaira, Oscar Klefbom, Alex Petrovic, Andrej Sekera and Kailer Yamamoto. I suppose in theory it is entirely possible that the Oilers are merely keeping McDavid out of the skills competition in order to provide him with some additional rest, although it is not all that usual for a team to claim a player is hurt or injured when that is not in fact the case. That being said there is no question that McDavid has played a tremendous amount of hockey already this season, averaging nearly 23 minutes per game on the season, and I doubt there would be many fans who would argue that he hasn't earned an extra day off at this point if that is indeed what the Oilers are doing.

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