When Connor McDavid joined the Ontario Hockey League at the tender age of 15 back in 2012, you knew he was going to be special. In the years that have passed, he’s more than lived up to the hype.

As an 18-year-old playing out the final few games of his remarkable junior career with the Erie Otters, he’s leading the OHL in playoff scoring – not surprisingly – with 19 goals and 24 assists for 43 points in 17 games. He’s run roughshod over his opponents and in the league’s Western Conference final almost single-handedly defeated the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, the top-ranked team in the Canadian Hockey League.

In that six-game series he scored seven goals and added seven assists, antagonizing what was thought to be a strong Soo defence and a depth-filled team that stocked up before the trade deadline to take a run at a league championship.

“Nobody has been able to shut down the McDavid kid,” Oshawa Generals coach D.J. Smith told the Columbus Dispatch. “He’s running through our league like nobody has done before.”

That all changed last weekend when McDavid faced the Generals in the OHL final. In winning the opening two games on home ice, Oshawa held the projected top pick at the 2015 NHL draft to a single point.

“It’s just paying special attention to him when he’s on the ice,” said Generals captain Josh Brown, who along with Dakota Mermis are the defensive pair assigned to McDavid. “We’ve watched the video, we know how fancy and unreal he can play, so we’ve been paying special attention to our systems and it’s been working so far.”

In Game 2, Oshawa held McDavid scoreless – a feat no other team had been able to do since the Niagara IceDogs on March 11 before the start of the OHL playoffs.

Oddly enough, prior to Oshawa, the team that seemed to do the best job of containing McDavid in the playoffs were the young Sarnia Sting in the first round. Assistant coach Chris Lazary said his team went through hours and hours of McDavid video. They focused particularly on the breakouts the Otters have designed specifically to get McDavid the puck and the space to skate with it.

“They’ll do a set breakout more than probably any other team in our league,” said Lazary. “We went back and heavily pre-scouted six, seven, eight of the breakouts that we thought they used the most and we’d counteract that with a set forecheck so at least he wasn’t picking up the puck with speed – another player might get it, but he was eliminated from getting the puck where he wanted it with a lot of room to skate.”

Sounds easy enough. The problem, says Lazary, is when McDavid does get the puck – particularly behind the net – the opposition tends to scramble.

“When he enters the zone with the puck, if he’s coming down the left-wing side most of the time he’ll take the puck around the net and he’ll either make a quick little slip pass because everybody panics when he goes around the net and they cheat to the puck for some reason,” said Lazary, who once coached McDavid as a minor bantam during a spring tournament.

Like Sarnia, Brown says the Oshawa staff have dedicated hours to breaking down video to pick apart McDavid’s habits and tendencies – of which there are many.

“It’s tough because he’s got great speed and unbelievable hands,” said Brown. “We’re just trying to keep puck out of his hands. He’s a pretty shifty player so you can’t just bull-rush him, so you almost have to play a man and a half on him and (use the body) when you get a chance.”

Still, the fact that Oshawa has been able to contain McDavid through two games has been impressive. But with the next two games on home ice at the Erie Insurance Arena, it might just be a matter of time before McDavid and the Otters find their footing once again.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to stop him completely,” said Bob Jones, who runs the defence as associate coach with the Windsor Spitfires. “I think you can limit his chances by playing a good brand of team defence – putting back pressure on him from the forwards, the (defence) having a tight gap giving him less time and space to maneuver the puck.

“You have to guard against him getting behind your net, so you want to push him up the walls and push him away from the net.”

Which is exactly what Oshawa has managed to do thus far.

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