McDavid gets 81st point, Oilers pass Jets with win

WINNIPEG --Connor McDavid scored his third hat trick of the season for the Edmonton Oilers, who passed the Winnipeg Jets for second place in the Scotia North Division with a 6-1 win at Bell MTS Place on Monday.

McDavid, who also had an assist, leads the NHL with 81 points (28 goals, 53 assists) in 46 games. He is on pace to score 99 points this season.
"His year, this year, has been just superb," Oilers coach Dave Tippett said. "There's very few people that you see who can dominate a game like he can, and he does it in a lot of different aspects of the game. His speed is unbelievable, but his hands and his thinking are at another level also. He's a driver on our team."
Leon Draisaitl had a goal and an assist, and Mike Smith made 36 saves for Edmonton (28-16-2), which has won three of its past four games and leads Winnipeg by one point with two games in hand.
The top four teams in the division will qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
"It's good for our confidence," McDavid said of the Oilers' 6-2-0 record against the Jets this season. "But the playoffs is a different animal. We're obviously jostling for position and kind of leaning that way that we might play them, so we want to finish ahead of them and have home-ice advantage. We'll see what happens moving forward."
Mark Scheifele scored for Winnipeg (27-18-3), which has lost four in a row. Connor Hellebuyck allowed six goals on 23 shots before being replaced at the start of the third period by Laurent Brossoit, who made seven saves.
"It was enough," Jets coach Paul Maurice said. "I didn't want Connor skating off the ice in that game because he's made a bunch of saves. I didn't have him [responsible] for any of them. I didn't want him coming off the ice during the period and making the skate so, after two, he had had enough work."

Alex Chiasson scored his 100th NHL goal to give the Oilers a 1-0 lead at 16:22 of the first period before McDavid chipped in the rebound of Tyson Barrie's initial shot to make it 2-0 at 18:31.
McDavid then extended the lead to 3-0 at 3:35 of the second period when he faked a slap shot and beat Hellebuyck five-hole.
"I think our team just seems to play well against them," McDavid said. "We know it's going to be a tough game every time we play them. They have some of the best forwards around the League and their goaltender is coming off a Vezina season, so they're as good a team as you're going to find. We come in and we're prepared for a great game each and every time, and we seem to play them hard. So I think it starts with the whole group."
Draisaitl pushed it to 4-0 at 11:40 of the second with a one-timer on a 2-on-1 with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. The goal was Draisaitl's 488th NHL point, passing Marco Sturm for the most by a Germany-born player in NHL history.
"Obviously [Sturm], Christian Ehrhoff, [Marcel Goc], those kind of guys, those are the guys I looked up to," Draisaitl said. "We've had some really, really good hockey players in Germany and there's more and more coming. It means a lot to me to be at the top of that list."

Darnell Nurse made it 5-0 at 13:18. The goal was his 14th this season, which is two behind Jakob Chychrun of the Arizona Coyotes for the most in the NHL among defensemen.
"We left [Hellebuyck] out to dry, as we have a lot lately," Jets forward Paul Stastny said. "So that's embarrassing on our behalf, and then we've just got to take a look at ourselves, to know what works and what doesn't work. Kind of have a game plan and simplify it."
Scheifele scored a power-play goal to make it 5-1 at 15:06 of the second.
McDavid completed the hat trick on a breakaway at 16:30 for the 6-1 final.
"Obviously it's frustrating losing four in a row," Jets forward Andrew Copp said. "We're not playing up to our potential. So there's no way around it. There's no easy fix. You've just got to go straight through the adversity and straight through the wall and just dig in and work through it.
"If we dig deep, we can kind of revert back to some of the positives we've had over the course of the season and kind of trick ourselves into feeling good. I think temporarily shaken but definitely not broken."
NOTES:McDavid has scored 19 points (seven goals, 12 assists) in the eight games against the Jets this season. … Edmonton is 19-2-1 when scoring first. … Oilers defenseman Tyson Barrie played in his 600th NHL game. … Defenseman Dmitry Kulikov had one shot and four hits in 18:23 of ice time in his Oilers debut. … Edmonton forward Ryan McLeod had one shot and was 3-for-5 on face-offs in 14:18 of ice time in his NHL debut.