Connor McDavid and the Loneliness of Greatness
The announcement of Connor McDavid’s Ted Lindsay Award today by the NHL doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a version of greatness in hockey that shows up in trophies, numbers, and highlight reels. Then there’s the version you only see when things slow down a little.
For Connor McDavid, the résumé is already ridiculous. Multiple Art Ross Trophies. Multiple Hart Trophies. Multiple Ted Lindsay Awards. A Conn Smythe. The kind of list that usually defines a career. And yet, if you listen closely to the people around him, that’s not really where the story starts.
It starts somewhere simpler. It starts with the fact that he still misses his childhood friends.
The part of McDavid’s greatness nobody really talks about.
That detail says more than most stat lines ever could. Because the reality is, NHL stardom doesn’t just elevate a player—it separates them from almost everything normal. The schedule gets tighter. The expectations get heavier. The world gets smaller in a very specific way.
Most people grow their lives outward as they get older—more friends, more routines, more shared time. Hockey does the opposite for elite players. It narrows everything.
And at McDavid’s level, it narrows it almost completely. Even success doesn’t really fix that. If anything, it makes the circle even smaller because fewer and fewer people can actually relate to what he’s doing on a nightly basis.
McDavid’s family’s surprise made it all feel human again.
That’s why the story of his Ted Lindsay surprise hits a little differently. It wasn’t just teammates or league recognition. It was family. It was his wife. It was his brother. And most importantly, it was the people who knew him long before any of this started—his childhood friends.
The ones who remember him before he became “McDavid.” There’s something grounding in that. Almost a reset button for a career that is constantly in motion. Because no matter how far a player goes in this league, those early connections don’t just disappear. They just get harder to reach.
Greatness can reward, but it can also actually cost a player like McDavid.
We tend to talk about greatness like it’s purely additive. More goals. More awards. More legacy. But there’s another side to it that doesn’t get discussed enough. It takes things away, too. Not in a dramatic way, and not always in a negative one. It’s just unavoidable.
There’s less normal time. Fewer shared experiences. A smaller and smaller group of people who understand what life actually looks like. McDavid doesn’t seem unhappy with that. That’s not the point.
One video I watched spoke to this point about McDavid’s “everyday” life.
There’s also that everyday side of it that fans rarely see. There’s a clip I remember of McDavid in the Edmonton winter, just trying to load groceries into the trunk with his wife, when fans quickly recognize him and start calling out and gathering around him. He wasn’t rude or dismissive—he just had to keep moving and finish what he was doing.
That’s the reality of it. Even simple, normal moments come with noise attached. And for someone like McDavid, who comes across as polite, approachable, and willing to engage, there are still times when the only real option is to step back into himself and keep going. That’s part of what greatness does, too. It doesn’t just elevate your life; it removes a lot of the quiet that most people take for granted.
There’s a cost to being great for McDavid.
The point is that even at the absolute peak of the sport, there’s still a human cost to being there. And sometimes you see it most clearly not in the games, but in moments like this. When the spotlight shifts away from the awards for a second, and you remember the person underneath them.
Congratulations to McDavid, yet another award is well deserved. It’s fitting he gets to share it with family.