A rumor that circulated online in August 2025 claimed that NHL star Connor McDavid had donated $12.9 million in bonuses and sponsorship earnings to establish homeless support centers in Edmonton, Alberta, the home of his Edmonton Oilers. Snopes readers emailed us and searched the website to ask whether the rumor was true.<\/p>\n
For example, on Aug. 9, the Facebook page Orange Line Legends posted<\/a> (archived<\/a>) the story, receiving more than 98,000 reactions. The post displayed a picture of McDavid giving a thumbs up next to photos of two houses, presumably the supposed homeless support shelters.\u00a0<\/p>\n The story began, “BREAKING NEWS: Canadian hockey star Connor McDavid has donated his entire $12.9 million bonus and sponsorship earnings to fund a series of homeless support centers in Edmonton, home of the Edmonton Oilers.”<\/p>\n Other Facebook users also shared the same claim. Some of those posts featured links in top comments leading to articles hosted by advertisement-filled WordPress blogs<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, we found no evidence supporting the claim that McDavid had donated that amount to establish homeless centers in Edmonton. Searches of Bing<\/a>, DuckDuckGo<\/a>, Google<\/a> and Yahoo<\/a> found no news media outlets reporting about McDavid’s supposed donation. Prominent news media outlets would have widely reported this story, if true.<\/p>\n Rather, the person or people who authored the story fabricated the entire tale as one of hundreds of inspirational tales that depicted celebrities and athletes performing inspiring acts of kindness. They aimed to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts. The story about McDavid amounted to fiction.<\/p>\n An examination of the Orange Line Legends<\/a> page’s stories found multiple indications of artificial intelligence-generated images and text. For example, an Aug. 2 post<\/a> on the page claimed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had threatened to ban NHL players from buying Teslas if the Oilers did not partner with him. Signs of AI<\/a> featured in the photo included Musk holding a sign that misspelled the name of his own car company as “Testa.”<\/p>\n Snopes contacted a manager of the Orange Line Legends Facebook page to ask about the fictional stories displayed on the feed, and will update this story if we receive more information.<\/p>\n These stories all very much resembled glurge<\/a>, which Dictionary.com defines<\/a> as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”<\/p>\n