Connor McDavid leads the Stanley Cup Playoffs in scoring. He put up 12 points for the Edmonton Oilers in their five-game series against the Los Angeles Kings, including a five-assist performance in Game 1.

So, for the Vancouver Canucks to limit McDavid to a single secondary assist and zero shots on goal in over 24 minutes of ice time is legitimately impressive.

“Shutting down” McDavid is always going to be a relative term. After all, he still improved his point total to 13 in the playoffs, but his assist came on a goal that he had little to do with — he passed the puck back to Evan Bouchard in the defensive zone, he passed it to Zach Hyman, and Hyman did all the rest, getting a lucky deflection off Tyler Myers’ stick to beat Arturs Silovs.

The more impressive part was keeping McDavid from getting a single shot for the first time in his career in the playoffs.

During the regular season, McDavid averaged 3.46 shots per game and a dozen games with 6+ shots. He was held without a shot just twice and in one of those two games he had four assists.

It wasn’t just that McDavid had zero shots on goal; he had just one shot attempt — a bad angle shot off the rush that missed the net.

So, how were the Canucks so effective against McDavid in Game 1? And can they repeat that performance for the rest of the series?

“It was a team effort.”

The main match-up line that faced McDavid was J.T. Miller’s line with Pius Suter and Brock Boeser, with all three forwards spending more than 12 minutes up against McDavid at even-strength.

The primary defence pairing matched up against McDavid was Tyler Myers and Carson Soucy, followed closely by Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek.

That said, every Canucks skater played at least one shift against McDavid.

“I thought that it was a team effort,” said Quinn Hughes about shutting down the McDavid line. “We had six defencemen that did a really good job, I thought Arty made the saves when he had to, and twelve forwards that played hard, played within our structure, didn’t give them much, and helped the defence.”

That can be seen on this rush chance for McDavid where he got his only shot attempt. A steal by McDavid created a 3-on-2, but Elias Lindholm’s hustle on the backcheck took Mattias Janmark away as a passing option, allowing Ian Cole to play an aggressive gap on McDavid to force him to the outside and a low-percentage shot.