http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/teams/pit
Dec 9, 2:17 am EST
PITTSBURGH, PA - DECEMBER 08: Sidney Crosby handles the puck in his feet against Phil Kessel of the Toronto Maple Leafs at Consol Energy Center on December 8, 2010 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images)PITTSBURGH – Sidney Crosby sniffed, clearing his thoughts as much as anything, buying some time. He had been asked to define, in his mind, the phrase “best player in the game.” He was reluctant to do it.
“I don’t know,” Crosby said. “I don’t really think about it. Everyone …”
Crosby stopped himself.
“I don’t know.”
But he must think about it. He must know. So he was pressed. What kind of qualities would the best player have?
“Well,” Crosby said, relenting a little, “there’s a lot that goes into being a hockey player, depending on what you play. I mean, I could sit here for two minutes and tell you things. Faceoff. Shot. Passing. Leadership. Defensive play. Being a good teammate. There’s a ton of different things. But it’s pretty tough to do. That’s why everyone is always arguing who it is.”
Crosby won’t come out and make a case for himself. That’s about as close as you’re going to get. At least in an interview.
On the ice? That’s different. The captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins is playing better than ever before, and this is someone who has won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player, the Stanley Cup and an Olympic gold medal already at age 23.
Crosby scored two more goals Wednesday night in a 5-2 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs. He has posted 20 goals and 15 assists during a 17-game point streak. He has factored into nearly 60 percent of the Penguins’ goals during an 11-game winning streak. A team that started 6-7-1, that has played the past three games without No. 2 center Evgeni Malkin, that has played the whole season without No. 3 center Jordan Staal, leads the NHL with 42 points.
All of this has come while the NHL is using Crosby and the Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin – his biggest rival in the best-player debate – to market the sport to a broader audience. Vanity Fair features a photo spread of the two stars in its latest issue. HBO began embedding camera crews with their teams this week for a behind-the-scenes miniseries leading up to their meeting in the Winter Classic, the league’s annual outdoor game on New Year’s Day.
And it just so happens that Crosby caught fire as another player started to steal the spotlight. The Hockey News features the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Steve Stamkos on the cover of its latest issue. The headline: “The NHL’s NEW BEST PLAYER.” The key line from the story: “Without a doubt, Stamkos is the best offensive player in the NHL right now.”
Oh, yeah? With 26 goals and 24 assists, Crosby now has 50 points in 30 games. He has a 10-point lead over Stamkos – and a 15-point lead over Ovechkin – in the scoring race. He’s on pace for more than 71 goals and 136 points, numbers the NHL hasn’t seen since the early to mid-1990s.
That’s a pretty strong case.
“M-V-P!” the fans shouted Wednesday night in Pittsburgh. “M-V-P!”
We can’t climb into Crosby’s head and heart. He guards his privacy. He said he didn’t think he would allow HBO cameras to follow him home, as much as the NHL and the Penguins would love to show more shades of his personality, so good luck getting him to open up on his deepest motivations.
But no one works at his craft as hard as Crosby does without a burning desire to be the best. Crosby has spent thousands of hours training since he was a teenager. He obsesses about the biomechanics of his stride. He always shows up for skates – even the optional ones – trying to improve some skill.
“It still amazes me everything he does,” Penguins goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury said. “I swear at him sometimes in practice.”
Crosby has said that last season was the best of his career. He scored 51 goals, a career high, tying Stamkos for the league lead. He recorded 109 points, same as Ovechkin and only three fewer than the league leader, the Vancouver Canucks’ Henrik Sedin. And he did it without the support the others have.
Stamkos has Martin St. Louis. Ovechkin has Nicklas Backstrom. Sedin has his twin brother, Daniel. Crosby has Malkin, but they don’t play together as much as those other sets of teammates do.
Still, Henrik Sedin won the Hart, making it three years in a row that Crosby didn’t win the MVP award. The players – Crosby’s peers – also picked Ovechkin as the NHL’s most outstanding player for the third year in a row. There are whispers that deep down, in places Crosby doesn’t talk about at parties (or in the media), that hurt.
What does it mean to be the best?
“Everybody’s different,” Crosby said. “Some guys choose to work on specific things and really make sure that they have those skills perfected. Other guys try to work on all types of different things and might not be the very best at them, but they bring a lot of different things.”
That might be another way of saying this: If you’re looking for the best shot in the game, it belongs to Stamkos. If you want the best combination of power and skill, that’s Ovechkin. But if you define the best player the way Crosby does, well, it’s Crosby.
Faceoff? Shot? Passing? Crosby once struggled on faceoffs; he has become one of the top faceoff men in the league. Crosby once was more of a set-up artist; he concentrated on shooting more last season and ended up scoring a dozen more goals than he ever had before.
Leadership? Defensive play? Being a good teammate? Crosby sets the example for his teammates with his work ethic. He’s a two-way player who does the little things. And he impacts the game and his team in so many ways.
One reason Crosby is so successful offensively is because of how responsible he is defensively. Say there is an important faceoff in the Penguins’ zone. Coach Dan Bylsma sends out Crosby. “It’s an offensive-zone faceoff for the opposition,” Bylsma said. “They send out their best line, and we have Crosby’s line. I’m not sure their focus is at that point in time shutting down [No.] 87 and his line.” Next thing you know, Crosby is headed the other way against players for whom defense is not the top priority.
At the same time, one reason the Penguins have improved defensively this season is because of how prolific Crosby is offensively. The Penguins felt they had been scoring enough goals but giving up too many. So instead of spending salary-cap room on a winger that Crosby didn’t really need, they spent it on defensemen Paul Martin and Zbynek Michalek (letting offensive defenseman Sergei Gonchar go as a free agent). While Crosby has lit it up with Chris Kunitz and Pascal Dupuis as his linemates, the Penguins have allowed less than 1.6 goals per game during their winning streak.
The key is Crosby’s all-around game. He lacks one defining skill, but that means opponents can’t take away his strength. They try to match defense pairings against him. They try to get physical with him. They try to take away his time and space. They try to keep an eye on him at all times. “If you don’t know where he is,” Leafs defenseman Mike Komisarek said, “it’s probably not a good thing.” And he just does his thing, excelling in several areas, from flying through the neutral zone to going hard to the net.
“You know, I don’t see him making adjustments to what people are trying to do,” Bylsma said. “He’s just playing the game and playing within our structure, playing the right way.”
This is not like when Crosby focused on faceoffs or his shot.
“I don’t feel like I’m that much better in any area,” Crosby said.
Nope. Not any one area. All areas.
Brent Johnson, the Penguins’ backup goaltender, looked back at the beginning. He recalled one night when he was playing for the Capitals at the Penguins’ old home and Crosby introduced himself.
“I remember a time in Mellon Arena when he had no room to score whatsoever on me, and he got a backhand up from a foot out and put it right under the bar on me,” Johnson said. “I was like, ‘How the heck did that kid do that?’ ”
Then Johnson paused and looked to the future.
“There’s no end to him,” Johnson said.
No one knows how good Crosby can become. No one knows how the horse race will develop over the coming weeks, months and years between Crosby, Ovechkin, Stamkos and others, either. But the Penguins’ past 17 games have proven at least one thing.
“I try to be my best,” Crosby said.
And by his own definition, that can make Sidney Crosby the best player in the game.
Crosby’s surge reminiscent of Gretzky, Lemieux
By ALAN ROBINSON, AP Sports Writer
http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/teams/pit
Dec 9, 6:17 pm EST
Sidney Crosby shoots for his second goal of the NHL hockey game, in the second period against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010, in Pittsburgh. (AP)PITTSBURGH (AP)—Bill Guerin played alongside Sidney Crosby in Pittsburgh for more than a season, so he knows what he’s watching from afar now that’s he retired.
It’s beyond special, beyond what the NHL has seen for a long time. Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux scored like this, dazzled like this, singularly decided game after game like Crosby is doing. But no one else has since they left the game.
“I was lucky enough to play against Gretzky, play against Mario, (Jaromir) Jagr, those guys,” said Guerin, who scored 429 goals in his career. “But what Sidney’s doing right now, it’s like an assault on the game. I think he’s so driven, like a player that I’ve never seen before.”
It’s more like an assault on goaltenders.
At age 23, Crosby has already won a Stanley Cup, the NHL MVP award and a scoring title. He’s a cultural icon in his native Canada, where he was chosen as a national magazine’s man of the year for his Olympic gold medal-winning goal. Yet to talk to him, it’s almost as if he has so much more to do, so much more to prove.
In a league where blanketing defenses, lineman-sized defensemen and excellent goaltending make goal-scoring increasingly difficult, Crosby is accumulating statistics rarely seen since the early 1990s. Crosby has at least one point—and usually a lot more—in 17 consecutive games while leading the Penguins on an 11-game winning streak.
During his own streak, Crosby has 20 goals and 15 assists, or more points than all but two NHL players have all season. He has four multiple-goal games in his last six alone, and is on pace for 71 goals and 136 points in an era when 100-point scorers are increasingly rare.
After scoring two goals Wednesday against Toronto, Crosby needs 24 over his next 20 contests to become only the sixth player with 50 goals in his team’s first 50 games. Brett Hull, in 1992, was the last player to reach that.
Ridiculous? Perhaps not, considering that a driven Crosby has nine goals in his last four home games alone. No wonder the Penguins, as of Friday, won’t have lost a game in regulation for exactly a month.
“Honestly, I think it’s pretty farfetched for that to happen,” Crosby said of 50 in 50. “Maybe someday, somebody will do it and, if they do, it’s unbelievable. It’s pretty easy not to think about it because I don’t see it happening.”
It was difficult for anyone to see the second-longest winning streak in Penguins’ history occurring, especially given they began the season with a 6-7-1 record. But since Crosby began simulating Lemieux, the Penguins are 14-2-1.
Coach Dan Bylsma said Crosby is doing it without any slippage in his increasingly diverse game. Crosby, for example, wasn’t strong on faceoffs when he came into the league at age 18 in 2005. Yet, he’s now the league leader in faceoffs won.
“He’s making a lot of special plays and it seems to be every night,” Bylsma said. “I think the unique part about this situation right now is the consistency at which he’s there. His highlight reel is long, but the consistency with which he’s playing, there’s no cheat, there’s no holes, there’s no ‘on his own page.’ It’s within the structure of our team and how we want to play.”
There’s almost no privacy, either.
Crosby is being dogged daily by an HBO crew taping his every move for a series of specials leading up to the Winter Classic against Washington and co-star Alex Ovechkin on Jan. 1. While he values his privacy and guards his image, Crosby doesn’t seem overly concerned the shows might reveal that his on-ice vocabulary contains curse words. For now, though, he’s drawing the line at being taped inside his home.
Like Guerin, Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman won’t need to watch the shows to know what he’s seeing.
At the NHL board of governors meetings this week, Yzerman said Crosby is the best possible role model for young players because he blocks shots, wins faceoffs and create goals with his passing, not just with his shooting. It’s the kind of multitasking few superstar-level players are willing to do.
Even after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup in 2009, Crosby spent that summer working on his shooting, and his goal production jumped from 33 that season to 51 in 2009-10. This season, he has 26 goals and 50 points in only 30 games.
Crosby won’t guess whether, despite seemingly having years and years left to play, this might be the prime of his career.
“It’s different for everybody,” he said. “It depends on a lot of things— when you come in, your situation, your role on the team. I guess the average, I would say, is 25 to whatever. But with guys coming in as young as they are now, it might be a little earlier.”
The Penguins have built their Crosby-led winning streak despite minimal contributions from the injured Evgeni Malkin (knee), who has one goal since Nov. 13, and none from forward Jordan Staal (foot, hand), who hasn’t played this season.
“Imagine how things are going to roll when those two come back,” forward Pascal Dupuis said.
Imagine if Crosby keeps scoring like this.
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