EA Sports dropped the news Monday: Connor McDavid is officially the inaugural member of the NHL 99 Club, the first player in the franchise's history to hit a 99 overall rating in NHL 27. It's the kind of number that basically doesn't exist in this game — Madden hands out 99s more freely, but NHL has kept its ceiling lower for years. McDavid just broke it.
The rating comes off a season where McDavid posted 48 goals and 138 points in 82 games for Edmonton, numbers that have made him the sport's clear top talent for the better part of a decade now. He's not just fast anymore — he's fast AND he's putting up video-game stat lines, which is apparently enough to make EA rip up its own rating scale.
This isn't McDavid's first time flirting with the top of the ratings ladder, either. He's been EA's poster boy since he hit a 95 overall back in NHL 20, and he's spent the years since publicly wondering why the series doesn't do 99s the way other EA titles do. Now he's got his answer, and it's his own face on the milestone.
The timing lines up with a bigger offseason story in Edmonton. McDavid signed a two-year, $25 million extension with the Oilers that kicks in this season, a deal worth $12.5 million a year that — notably — doesn't even make him the highest-paid player on his own roster, with Leon Draisaitl's $14 million AAV still ahead of it. McDavid framed the shorter-term deal as staying locked in on chasing a Cup with Edmonton's current core rather than cashing the biggest possible check.
None of that changes the game-cover math, though. A 99 overall is EA basically saying there's no ceiling left to model — McDavid is the rating scale now. Whether that translates into an actual championship banner in Edmonton is a different question, but as far as NHL 27 is concerned, he's already the best there's ever been in a jersey.