from Terry Jones of the Edmonton Sun,

In my mind, it was going to be a wonderful event.

There would be a capacity crowd with young fans holding ‘Happy Birthday Connor’ signs and everybody would stand and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him.

Indeed, there was a capacity crowd for the Edmonton Oilers Super Skills Competition Sunday at Rogers Place. Most of the fans were kids. And several held up signs wishing McDavid ‘Happy Birthday’ cardboard signs....

There was no big public address system announcement in the building to inform fans that McDavid wouldn’t be on the ice. In fact there was no announcement at all.

The Oilers simply flashed, and I do mean flashed because it wasn’t up there more than a few seconds, a notice informing that the following players would not be involved because of injury or sickness: Connor McDavid, Jujhar Khaira, Alexander Petrovic, Andrej Sekera and Kailer Yamamoto....

Actually, I broke the story in the morning on Twitter (apparently that counts as a scoop these days) reporting that McDavid was sick and wouldn’t be there.

The response from followers was predictable:

• “Sick of losing?”

• “Sick of Edmonton?”

• “Bad back from carrying 22 players on it?”

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