For 18-year-old Connor McDavid, Friday night will be a dream come true.
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The 2015 NHL Draft emanates from the BB&T Center on Friday in Florida and McDavid is highly expected to don an Edmonton Oilers jersey as the club owns the No.1 overall pick and McDavid is highly regarded as a generational player.
"It's going to be a dream come true hearing your name called and going up on the stage," McDavid said Thursday, according to CBC Sports. "I can't really say how I'm going to be feeling. It's going to be an emotional day and an exciting day and I'm just looking forward to celebrating it with my family and friends."
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The Oilers earned the right to select first in the draft for the fourth time in the last six years when they won the draft lottery on April 18.
Edmonton had the No. 1 overall pick in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and they selected Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov in each of those years.
Though they've been rebuilding for a while, the fact that the Oilers were in the draft lottery again shows that the re-structuring is still in full swing.
Edmonton finished 13th in the Western Conference with a 24-44-14 overall record and 62 points in 2014-15 and missed the playoffs for the ninth straight campaign.
McDavid could be a franchise-altering selection for Edmonton and he's drawn comparisons to Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby and NHL Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky.
McDavid, who played for the Erie Otters and is a native of Newmarket, Ont., won't buy too much into his own hype and the parallels between himself and some of the NHL's greatest players.
"It doesn't matter how I feel about it," McDavid said. "All I can do is do the best that I can and try and be the best player that I can be. Whether that meets expectations or not, that's not up to me to decide. I'm Connor and that's just how I play."
While the highly-touted center won't buy into all of the hype, he has full confidence in himself as the minutes tick closer to his draft.
"I think if you're going to be good that's the way it has to be: You have to have high expectations for yourself," McDavid said. "But there's a lot of pressure on me coming from the outside that I try not to put too much internal pressure on myself just because there's already enough of that out there."​
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