Exactly. Matthews is scoring at a 65 goal pace. I have a hard time believing in future seasons that he would be scoring at a 75-80+ goal pace.
Same for McDavid. He is scoring at a 135 point pace, I have a hard time seeing him scoring at a 150, 160+ point pace in the future.
Both are probably around peak level right now.
This very well could be the peak level of play for both players, but their numbers will seem fantastical only because we’re going up to 56 games.
Think of it this way. Crosby’s 2010-2011 is constantly talked about because it ended for him at a very clean 41 games and he went on a serious heater until a couple of games before the end. It’s easy for many to romanticize what could have been.
What is rarely brought up is his sophomore 2006-2007 season where he won the scoring title with 120 points in 79 games.
He had 95 points through 56 games. That’s almost 1.7 PPG and no one ever talks about it, no one ever mentions that he went 15 games deeper into the season than in 2010-2011 with a PPG that was .10 PPG higher, and a 139 point pace.
The reality is that he scored 25 points in his final 23 games and got to 120. No one mentions it because he played the rest of the season, won the awards, and it didn’t really matter that he didn’t push 140. Playing the full season naturally evened it out and fantasy talk didn’t spice it up more than it already was.
I believed that McDavid could flirt with 100 points going into this season because for 2.5 years straight, he had been averaging over 1.5 ppg and it didn’t seem inconceivable to me that given full health, his age, and the all conditions and stipulations of this season, that he could bump his production up an additional 10-15 points.
I don’t believe for a second that even if he gets to 100 in 56 that it means he would cross 145 points in a full normal campaign. Going past 130 would really surprise me.
If we get a full season next year, McDavid will very likely break his career high of 116 points and it will be seen as a slight disappointment or drop off from this season (if he ends up with 95-100 points) because he’s going to play 26 more games (if healthy) that will naturally drag down his PPG, pace, projections, and so on.