Treat him like he's 18? You can bet that opposing teams won't be treating him like an 18 year-old; rather they'll be treating him as a legitimate offensive threat who can single-handedly win games, because that's what he will be come this season. Meanwhile, Connor McDavid will be treating other team's defensive players and goalies like little kids pushing chairs around the ice while the big boys shinny around them.
Anyways, McDavid is an anomaly, so people should stop comparing him to past 1st overalls and other rookie 18 year-olds unless those comparisons are with Crosby. He is that good. My crystal ball says that he will be a point per game player in his rookie season.
The Hockey News projects 83 points for McDavid.
Ya, well shows people are under predicting if anything. The Hockey news is usually quite good and certainly not bias. I assume scoring will be up, so 83 isn't bad. I imagine some one will bounce back and get 100 points this year.
Why assume scoring be up?
3 on 3 during OT will probably result in more actual points during wins instead of points lost to shootout wins.
I don't think 3-on-3 OT will make that big a difference. Usually, around 23% of games go to OT; if (and this is a generous assumption on my part) 3-on-3 play sees 60% of those games end in sudden death (up from the current 44%), that means we'll see an additional 47 goals scored league wide over the course of the season. basically one and half more goals per team.
Why assume scoring be up?
47 goals translates to what, another 70-ish assists on top of that. It's very likely that those extra points league-wide will be concentrated in the top scorers of league, rather than the current norm for the league where mid-tier players have a much bigger slice of the points-pie than in years previous. 3 on 3 minutes will likely go mostly to those top tier offensive forwards, and for us we will be giving McDavid all the 3 on 3 minutes he can handle.
Regardless, it's still a very modest boost. People are overestimating the impact of this change IMO.