At the time I began writing this piece yesterday evening, which was about thirty minutes before the first puck drop of the night between the Maples Leafs and Bruins, Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby, together, occupied a single point lead in the NHL's scoring race after the latter netted his league-leading 38th, 39th and 40th goals Sunday afternoon against Florida.
Narrowly trailing Crosby and McDavid and their league-leading 80 points were Patrick Kane, who recorded two points Sunday night during the Blackhawks triumphant comeback over Colorado, and Boston's Brad Marchand, who, like Kane, has seemingly found himself all over the score sheet each night for the past month after, I could only assume, selling his soul to mutate from the glorified Andrew Shaw he has been for the betterment of the past decade into Pavel Bure. Each currently sat at 79 points entering last night's action.
Art Ross Race Entering Monday Night
- Connor McDavid- EDM/Sidney Crosby - PIT - 80
- Patrick Kane - CHI/Brad Marchand- BOS - 79
- Nikas Backstrom - WSH - 75
- Evgeni Malkin - PIT - 72
- Mark Scheifele - WPG/Nikita Kucherov - TB - 71
As testament to how absurdly wild and unpredictable the spinning-out-of-control carousel the NHL scoring race has become, before I had even made it a quarter of the way through this piece, Marchand had tied McDavid and Crosby for tops in league scoring with his 80th point.
By the time I had barely begun updating the numbers and specifics in the very early rough draft of this article, McDavid had countered Marchand with two more helpers of his own - leapfrogging the Bruins winger and Crosby and subsequently taking sole possession of the Art Ross race for himself.
Art Ross Race Entering Tuesday Night
- Connor McDavid - EDM - 82
- Sidney Crosby - PIT/Brad Marchand - BOS - 80
- Patrick Kane - CHI - 79
- Niklas Backstrom - WSH - 75
- Evgeni Malkin - PIT - 72
Minutes is all it takes to turn this race on its head. I should have realized this long before I prematurely began writing about it. Leapfrogging chaos and one-upping is essentially an every night occurrence with these finalists so it's no one's fault but my own that I virtually had to start from scratch. Metaphorically speaking, this is what I get for attempting to write a game recap before the puck had even dropped.
At the pace the aforementioned names have been frequenting the score sheet, it's almost expected that my most recent list will become obsolete hours, if not minutes, into tonight's slate of games, as each finalist listed above aside from McDavid will be in action. Crosby and Malkin will visit Buffalo, Backstrom and his Caps play host to the white hot Calgary Flames, Marchand and the Bruins are at home versus the Senators and Patrick Kane and the
Chicago Blackhawks will welcome in the Vancouver Canucks to the United Center.
Regardless of who the Blackhawks are playing, you pretty much know what you're going to get night-in and night-out with Patrick Kane - highlight reel exploits and a boatload of points. In fact, the only player in the NHL who has scored at higher pace than the reigning Art Ross and Hart Trophy winner over the past month has been Tampa Bay's Nikita Kucherov.
Since January 1st, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the NHL hotter or more consistent than the Buffalo, NY native. Since the dawn of the New Year, Kane has posted 21 goals and 21 assists in 34 games. In that span, Kane has contributed 14 multi-point games and has been held scoreless only a handful of times - catapulting him from barely in the top 15 in the NHL in scoring to the top-3 in what felt like overnight. As we saw for much of 2015-2016 when Kane ran away with the Art Ross race after posting 106 points - Jamie Benn's 89 points was his closest threat - the Blackhawks winger is seemingly locked in after a good, but underwhelming in Kane standards, start to the year.
All we can do now is wait and see how Kane responds to Marchand and McDavid's slight step ahead in the race tonight. I guess the more viable question at this point would be, does the winger post a single point or multi-point game?
Follow me on Twitter
@BForanNHL for live updates on the NHL scoring race. I'll be keeping tabs on each player in action throughout the night.
