Connor McDavid shows winning desire with Players’ Tribune letter
The Milan Cortina 2026 Olympics hit the ice on Wednesday, but plenty of eyes won’t be tuning in until next week, when the best men’s hockey players in the world make their way back to the most significant international sporting stage for the first time since 2014.
For some, like Sidney Crosby and Drew Doughty, the 2026 Games are nothing but a triumphant return, but for others, like Edmonton Oilers superstar Connor McDavid, there’s a chance for this Team Canada experience to be an international coming-out party in front of a far-reaching audience than seen at the North American-focused 4 Nations Face-Off.
On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, The Sheet’s Jeff Marek joined co-hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton to break down McDavid’s letter of intent in The Players’ Tribune.
Carter Hutton: It’s motivating, right, as we’re looking into the Olympics. For me, it brings back childhood memories of watching Olympic hockey and international play, best-on-best, and how much it means. When you take away the money, and you take away the fame, this is just playing for your country in the jersey, and I think that’s where he is at. I think for him, it’s a candid look at how badly he wants to win.
We debate Olympic rosters, so much right? He talks about going into overtime in that 4 Nations Face-Off, with Sidney Crosby, Brad Marchand and Drew Doughty. He talks about sitting in the room and looking around at those veteran guys before they went into overtime, and just having an ease of calmness come over him, knowing that they were going to get the job done. As we debate who should be on the team and who shouldn’t, there’s value that doesn’t show up on a stat sheet, and I think McDavid is the greatest player in the world right now, and he’s telling you what those guys do to you, mentally, physically, heading into those games. I think that’s a value that is on the outside, sometimes you don’t really see.
Jeff Marek: He has the intensity to win, and let’s not forget here too, one of the things when you get to this point in his career, when he’s talking about looking around the room and seeing all those players — what do they all have in common? What does this team, the Canada roster, sort of all have in common? Rings. Look at all the rings, right? To me, it was that reinforcement of what this guy is chasing. Jack Eichel has a Stanley Cup ring, Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, go look around the room.
To me, reading between the lines of what McDavid was saying is that he wants to be around winners. He hasn’t. He never won the OHL cup, right? That was a big one when he played U16 hockey; he lost to Robby Fabbri’s team, the Mississauga Rebels, at that point. In the OHL, he didn’t win the J. Ross Robertson Cup; he never got to the Memorial Cup; and so far, he hasn’t won the Stanley Cup. As much as he’s always been the best player in every league he’s ever been in, it’s not as if winning has followed him. I still think it burns inside them. As much as this sort of was like a ‘rah rah Olympics’ kind of thing for him, I think it was more that he’s driven to write his legacy. That’s what he’s all about, writing the legacy, and he can’t write a legacy unless he has a win.
You can catch the complete breakdown of McDavid’s letter and the rest of Tuesday’s Daily Faceoff Live episode here…