Efficiency is a trap. Especially when you’re the fastest thing on two blades and carrying a $12.5 million annual cap hit.

Connor McDavid is the closest thing professional sports has to a perfectly optimized algorithm. He’s a biological supercomputer that processes visual input at 25 miles per hour while threading a puck through a gap the size of a nicotine patch. On paper, he should have three rings by now. In reality, he’s spent a decade banging his head against the glass ceiling of the Western Conference.

An anonymous league insider recently floated a theory that explains why the Great One 2.0 keeps stalling out in the third act. It isn’t about heart. It isn’t about "wanting it more," a phrase sports pundits use when they’ve run out of actual things to say.

The theory is simpler: McDavid has an optimization problem. He’s too fast for his own infrastructure.

Think of the Edmonton Oilers as a legacy tech company trying to run a high-end AI model on server hardware from 2008. You’ve got the shiny, expensive frontend that dazzles the shareholders, but the backend is a mess of spaghetti code and overpriced defensive contracts. When the pressure spikes—usually around mid-May—the whole system throttles.

The insider points to a specific friction: the McDavid Tax. When you pay one guy that much, you’re essentially betting that he can overclock the rest of the roster. But hockey doesn't scale that way. You can’t just "patch" a bottom-six forward to skate at McDavid’s frequency. Instead, what we see every spring is a weirdly predictable breakdown. The opponent realizes they don't have to beat McDavid; they just have to wait for the heat sink to fail. They clog the neutral zone, turn the game into a boring, analog slog, and suddenly the $100 million man is just another guy skating into a wall of cheap, heavy bodies.

It’s the classic "founder’s dilemma" played out on ice. The Oilers built the entire organization around a single point of failure. If McDavid isn't putting up three points a night, the stock price craters.

The trade-offs are getting uglier. Last season, the talk was all about defensive "adjustments" and "grit." Translation: they tried to add some friction to the gears. But you can’t have it both ways. You either let the Ferrari redline and hope the wheels don't fly off, or you put a speed governor on it so it can survive a commute through the mud. Edmonton chose the mud. They tried to turn a lightning bolt into a grinding machine, and all they got for their trouble was a highlight reel of McDavid looking exhausted while his teammates fumbled basic passes.

There’s also the psychological debt. The insider suggests that McDavid’s sheer competence creates a vacuum. When you have a guy who can solve every problem with a solo rush, the rest of the team stops learning how to solve problems themselves. They become passive. They wait for the "skip" to fix the code. By the time the playoffs roll around and the other team shuts down the main server, the backup systems have already rusted over.

We’ve seen this movie before. We saw it with Mike Trout in Anaheim. We saw it with prime Alex Ovechkin before he finally lucked into a year where the hardware held up. The difference is the speed. McDavid’s game is built on a razor-thin margin of error. One stumble, one missed rotation from a $5 million defenseman who’s out of his depth, and the season ends in a locker room interview where everyone looks like they just watched a car crash.

The Oilers keep buying expensive parts, hoping one of them will finally be the magic component that lets McDavid be McDavid for four rounds. They swap out goalies like they’re changing batteries in a smoke detector. They fire coaches like they’re clearing browser cookies.

But maybe the theory is right. Maybe the hump isn't something you get over. Maybe it’s just the natural limit of what one person can do in a game that’s designed to break individuals. You can optimize for regular-season greatness all you want. You can build the most efficient scoring machine in the history of the sport.

But the playoffs aren't a lab. They're a junkyard. And Ferraris don't do well in junkyards.

If the insiders are right, the Oilers aren't one piece away. They’re stuck in a loop of their own making, waiting for a result that the current architecture simply can't deliver.

How many more years do you spend refining the software before you realize the motherboard is cracked?