The Oilers had 4 minutes of penalties to kill in the last 8:45 and McDavid doesn't do PK. Without those 4 minutes I guarantee you that McDavid would have played more that 17:03.
Plus the guy apparently is really sick with the flu. If he was healthy I suspect his TOI would have been a lot closer to Draisaitl's who played 21:33 tonight.
Edit: The fact is that I would be very surprised if McDavid's ice time is reduced when the Oilers have a significant lead. 1) A significant lead is not going to happen very often. 2) If McDavid isn't on the ice for a significant portion of the game the Oilers are more likely to lose... he's that important to the team.
I know he's ultra important to the team, he's likely the singular most important player to his team, league wide. We are easily one of the worst teams in the league when he's not on the ice.
Who knows...if he plays two shifts in that time, thats about 1:48 of time. His average shift time is ~54 seconds. Doesn't get him near Draisaitl's time and perhaps if he didn't have the flu he would have played more. But he did have a flu and he played less than he normally does while it was also a blowout. What you're saying now is the sample size is too small, because we need to see a blowout AND a game where he doesn't have the flu...but Oiler blowouts are extremely rare. So I guess we'll probably not know for at least another 20 games.
The second least TOI he has recorded in a game this year was 18:12 in a win against DET (nov 3, we won 4-3 in Reg), where he recorded 2 assists. 18:22 TOI two games later where we got punched out 5-2 by the TBL (he recorded no points and was -2). It seems to me that his ice time has a few random outliers, and that there will never be a sample size large enough + or - from his avgTOI to give us any clue about how the coach plays him.
December 5th agains the blues, 3-2 SO win....he played 28 minutes and had 1 point.... What was so different between that game and the DET game that resulted in him playing 10 minutes more? I have no idea.
The only thing I know, is that unless he leaves the ice for injury, you will never see him play a 15 minute game. But his TOI is higher than 99% of forwards, so if he's playing less than 20 minutes, I'd say he's riding the bench to a degree.
97 is about to hit the part of his schedule where he takes it into turbo mode. Goodluck to anyone within a few points of him.
