Connor McDavid extended his NHL-record season-opening assist streak to 14 games on Saturday, October 31, 2026, setting up Ryan Nugent-Hopkins on a second-period power play as the Edmonton Oilers beat the New York Islanders 4-0 at UBS Arena in Elmont, New York. The assist was McDavid’s league-best 29th of the season, and it also gave him a 14-game point streak to match.
FINAL: Edmonton Oilers 4, New York Islanders 0. Nugent-Hopkins scored twice, Tristan Jarry stopped all 18 shots he faced for a second consecutive shutout, and Edmonton opened its three-game trip through New York with its sixth straight road win.
How to watch: Edmonton Oilers vs New York Islanders, Saturday, October 31, 2026, 2:00 p.m. ET at UBS Arena
Next up: Edmonton Oilers at New York Rangers, Sunday, November 1, 2026, at Madison Square Garden
Connor McDavid Assist Streak Reaches 14 Games
The record moved late in the second period. With Matthew Schaefer in the box for holding McDavid himself, the Oilers captain fed Nugent-Hopkins at the back door with 1:34 left in the frame, and Nugent-Hopkins put away his second goal of the afternoon for a 3-0 lead. Leon Draisaitl took the second assist on the play, his second helper of the game. That single pass carried three layers of history at once: it stretched the longest season-opening assist streak in NHL history to 14 games, it kept McDavid’s point streak level with it at 14, and it set a new career-long assist streak for McDavid himself, passing the 13 straight games he posted from February 13 to March 7, 2024, when he collected 27 assists in that span.
The season-opening mark itself is only three days old. On Wednesday in Edmonton, McDavid had two assists in a 4-0 win over the Calgary Flames to reach 13 straight games, passing the 12-game mark shared by Sebastian Aho in 2018-19, Ken Linseman in 1985-86 and Wayne Gretzky in 1982-83. Every game he plays with an assist from here is a new record, and Saturday afternoon on Long Island he made sure the streak survived its first road test of the trip. Through 14 games McDavid has eight goals, 29 assists and 37 points, a big lead in the league scoring race and, as The Associated Press noted in its game report, a pace for more than 200 points over a full season.
Nugent-Hopkins Scores Twice As Oilers Take Over
For most of the first period this was a road game Edmonton had to manage rather than a showcase. Less than two and a half minutes in, Islanders forward Emil Heineman was ejected with a five-minute major and a game misconduct for a knee-on-knee hit that injured Oilers forward Isaac Howard, who put no weight on his left leg as he was helped off the ice and did not return. The first period ended scoreless, with New York managing only three shots, and the game turned completely in a 62-second stretch of the second. At 11:18 of the period, Kasperi Kapanen forced a turnover on the forecheck and moved the puck into the middle for Nugent-Hopkins, who fired it past Ilya Sorokin for the 1-0 lead. Just over a minute later Draisaitl recovered his stick behind the Islanders net and fed Vasily Podkolzin at the far post for his ninth goal of the season and a 2-0 lead.
Nugent-Hopkins is playing his best hockey of the season after missing two weeks with a preseason injury. He has seven points, three goals and four assists, through his first five games, is riding a three-game point streak, and his power-play goal Saturday was the 90th of his career, moving him past Mark Messier for the seventh most in Oilers franchise history. He now sits on 294 career goals, two shy of Ryan Smyth for seventh place on the franchise list, and the afternoon marked his first multi-goal game of the season and the 38th of his career. Jason Dickinson closed the scoring with an empty-net goal in the third period, his first goal of the season, with Mathieu Joseph and Mattias Ekholm assisting.
Jarry Posts Back-To-Back Shutouts For Edmonton
The other streak that grew Saturday belongs to Tristan Jarry. After stopping 24 shots against Calgary on Wednesday, Jarry turned aside all 18 Islanders shots for his second shutout in four days and, per the Oilers, his first back-to-back clean sheets in six seasons. It was a light workload by design: Edmonton’s defensive performance kept New York to 18 shots total and three in the first period, and the Islanders never produced the kind of sustained pressure that would force Jarry into a game-stealing night. The Oilers’ own recap framed the afternoon in Halloween terms, opening its report with “Nightmare on Elm(ont) Street,” and for the home side the description fit. Sorokin made 20 saves in the loss, top Islanders defenceman Matthew Schaefer took two of New York’s five minor penalties, and the Islanders were also without defenceman Ryan Pulock, who left Thursday’s game at Minnesota with an upper-body injury.
The team numbers around the streaks keep building. Edmonton improves to 10-2-2, has won 10 of its first 14 games, and is a perfect 6-0-0 on the road, where it has outscored opponents 34-13. The Oilers sit at the top of the Western Conference for now, in their first season with Mike Babcock as coach, and they did Saturday’s work against an Islanders team that arrived on a two-game winning streak and falls to 7-5-2. New York hosts the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday night, with an answer needed on Howard’s counterpart concern on its own blue line and a scoring group that was shut out at home.
What McDavid’s Start Means Now
Records that fall in October usually need context to matter by spring, but this one is different in kind: a season-opening streak is a record about never having an off night. McDavid has set up at least one goal in every game Edmonton has played this season, against rivals and road teams alike, and the streak has already outlasted marks set by Gretzky, Linseman and Aho. The next test comes quickly. The Oilers play the second half of a back-to-back on Sunday at Madison Square Garden against the New York Rangers, where one more assist would push the record to 15 games and the point streak with it. For a Canadian captain on a Canadian team sitting first in the West, the streak is now the early story of the NHL season, and Saturday it survived Long Island without ever really looking in danger.
