How Sidney Crosby’s genius defines the Penguins

The goal that delivered the Pittsburgh Penguins to this Stanley Cup Final is the same goal they’ve scored a zillion times since 2005. Sidney Crosby went after the puck in the corner. He came away with it cleanly. A fortunate teammate moved to a prime shooting position. Crosby put the puck on a platter, and soon, it was in the net.

It was similar to the first point Crosby ever scored in the NHL: an assist on a Mark Recchi goal in the third period of the rookie’s first game in October 2005. “Go get the puck. Find a window. Put the puck through it.” Wash, rinse, and repeat. Crosby is the greatest player of this generation, and he has many gifts, but none has wowed me more often in the last 12 years than his puck retrieval.

Whether he’s corralling bouncing rubber on the half wall on a power play, outmuscling someone for it beneath the goal line, or making a ricochetting reception and then turning on his edge to set up the game-winning goal in double overtime of Game 7 in a conference final, he’s making it look so easy. Here are two great examples, from 2010 and the first round of this year’s playoffs.

The numbers bear out Crosby’s ceaseless brilliance as a possessor of the puck. In his career, the Penguins have gotten 54 percent of the game’s shot attempts when he’s been on the ice at even strength — 4 percent better than the rest of his team. He’s also good at turning possession into goals. His 44 during the regular season won him a second Rocket Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal scorer. He has seven goals in these playoffs, out of 20 points in 18 games. Overall, he’s second in the league scoring race behind teammate Evgeni Malkin.

Crosby turns 30 this summer. He has captained Pittsburgh to two Cups. His quest for a third continues with Game 1 of the Final on Monday against Nashville (8 p.m. ET, NBC). It’ll be his fourth Final appearance in the last 10 years.

There are people who will tell you that Crosby has never been better than he is right now. That is not true. Crosby’s peak was the first half of the 2010-11 season, when he averaged a preposterous 1.61 points and 0.78 goals per game at 23 years old. (The NHL’s career leader in goals per game, Mike Bossy, averaged 0.76 in an era that was far more high-scoring.) Crosby was filling the net at a historic pace for 41 games before a concussion robbed him of his season and a big chunk of the next one. We’ll never see a more dominant stretch.

Statistically, Crosby hasn’t improved a ton since he was an 18-year-old rookie. He’s settled between 84 and 89 points each of the last three regular seasons. When he was healthy earlier in his career, a Crosby 100-point year was as sure a thing as the sun rising in the east. The average NHL game featured 3.08 goals in Crosby’s rookie year. This year, the number was 2.77, and even that marks the highest total since the 2010-11 season that Crosby had been running away with. His totals have fallen off, too.

But he is still a mainstay at the top of the league scoring race. The next time Crosby plays more than 53 games in a season and doesn’t finish in the top six in points will be the first in his career. (He has done so during three presidential administrations and under four head coaches, with linemates ranging from Phil Kessel to Andy Hilbert.) He was second this year, beaten by the guy who’s going to succeed him as the player of the generation: Edmonton’s Connor McDavid. Other than McDavid, Crosby still trounces every young player in hockey.

He’s achieved longevity through his preternatural talent, but also by endlessly renovating his game. For years, Crosby seemed to take at least one huge leap every season. One year it’d be faceoffs, and another it’d be his shot — his forehand, because Crosby emerged from the womb with the best backhander in history.

But by now, Crosby has nearly run out of things to get way better at. (Faceoffs, where he just had his worst season ever, are about it.) He is now in the business of continual refinement. His shot has gotten markedly better, for one example. Crosby added a thunderous slapper to his repertoire a few years ago, and he had his best shooting percentage since 2010-11. There’s luck in that stat, but Crosby is undoubtedly a sharper goal scorer than he used to be. He’s not quite the same chaos-creating setup man he was when he was in his early 20s, but he’s now the best finisher in the sport.

Crosby played the fewest minutes this year of any healthy season in his career. The Penguins have also worked harder than ever to deploy him in favorable situations. He started 61 percent of his shifts in the opponent’s defensive end, by far the most of his career. If you look hard enough, you can see that Crosby is past his prime. He’s just so good that “past his prime” only means he’s a top-three player on the planet. Crosby has beaten back time’s advance with a longer spell of greatness than almost anyone.

In 2003-04, they were the NHL’s worst team. They totaled a laughable 58 points in the standings, played in front of fans dressed like orange seats at the decaying Mellon Arena, and finished dead last in the league. That netted them the best odds in the 2004 draft lottery, where the prize was a firecracker of a Russian winger named Alexander Ovechkin. He’d be the guy to save us, we had hoped.

That didn’t happen. Washington won the lottery, and the Capitals jumped the Penguins to pick Ovechkin first overall. This 10-year-old was devastated beyond measure. I shouldn’t have been. Missing on Ovechkin helped to save hockey in Pittsburgh altogether.

It’s not that Ovechkin hasn’t had a great career. He has. But the lockout-induced cancellation of the 2004-05 season created a perverse circumstance. The Penguins had been the league’s worst team, but for the 2005 draft, the league didn’t just award them the top lottery odds again. That wouldn’t have been quite fair, letting the same team have the most ping-pong balls in two straight lotteries.

To set its lottery odds, the NHL used a weighted system. There were 48 balls in a machine. The teams that got the best odds were those that missed the playoffs each year from 2002 to 2004 and didn’t pick first overall in any of those years’ drafts. By virtue of missing out on Ovechkin, the Penguins were one of those teams. They got three of those ping-pong balls. And then they got lucky.

Crosby was as surefire a first overall pick there has ever been. He was hailed as the greatest prospect the sport had seen since Wayne Gretzky. He’s lived up to it. And because the Penguins lost the Ovechkin sweeps, they had a 6.3 percent chance to get Crosby instead of 4.2 percent.

If the Penguins win the Cup this year, that’ll mark three times in three Cups that Crosby has beaten Ovechkin to get there. He’s had tons of help every time from Malkin, the center drafted one pick after Ovechkin in 2004. The Pens got a two-for-one.

The player picked one slot after Crosby in ‘05 by Anaheim, current Senators winger Bobby Ryan, was standing at the side of the net as Chris Kunitz finished Crosby’s feed to end the conference final on Thursday.

Mellon Arena, formerly the Civic Arena, had housed the team since it joined the league in 1967 and was open for a few years before that.

Mario Lemieux, the team’s greatest player ever, bought it in 1999. He exchanged his salary for his stake, saving the franchise from bankruptcy. The Penguins had what they viewed as an unfavorable revenue-sharing deal and tried for years to get out of the dome-shaped Igloo. They didn’t wind up doing so until 2010.

The Penguins demanded a publicly funded new arena and used other cities — especially Kansas City, which was opening a new venue in 2007 — as leverage. They made explicit threats about bolting. There were fits and starts that suggested the Penguins might get what they needed to stick around, including a proposed revenue partnership with a casino and a near sale to the guy who made the Blackberry.

State and local government eventually came around, as politicians who don’t want to be blamed for losing sports teams usually do. Lemieux said after the fact there “wasn’t a possibility” the team would leave, which is almost definitely untrue. The Penguins gave taxpayers a bath to make the new building happen, but they got what they wanted. They got what I wanted, too. Lemieux’s announcement to an Igloo crowd in 2007 that the Penguins wouldn’t leave town was an all-time sports moment for me.

Where Crosby comes in: fan interest. The Penguins were last in the league in attendance in 2003-04, putting less than 12,000 people in the seats per game. That number went up to about 16,000 the year after the lockout, when No. 87 was a rookie. It kept going up steadily from there. The team is now approaching 500 consecutive sellouts and hasn’t missed the playoffs since 2006. Crosby has been the central figure in the team’s renaissance, although it’s not fair to ignore the also stupendous Malkin.

Kids in Pittsburgh in the ‘90s had Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr to look to as sports heroes, the sort of players who’d convince a 5-year-old to play hockey. (Jagr, still my favorite athlete ever, did that for me.). Lemieux’s medically fueled decline, a salary dump of a Jagr trade, and the Penguins’ general incompetence from 2001 to 2004 created an enthusiasm vacuum. Crosby filled it, as a marketable superstar who also happened to create lots of goals. He made hockey boom in Pittsburgh again. The team’s success behind him, Malkin, and goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury has made it a behemoth. Hockeytahn, USA.

Lemieux has said that Crosby saved the franchise, and on that, he is probably right. The Penguins had been so miserable for the previous four seasons, and their future was in such disarray, that Crosby was a needed salve. The Penguins would’ve marched south without him, or they wouldn’t have been this good in Pittsburgh. They would not be four wins from the franchise’s fifth Stanley Cup in 50 years of existence.

There’s no overstating how fortunate the Penguins have been in their timetables for being good and bad in the last 35 years. They iced one of the worst teams in NHL history in 1983-84, and it netted them Lemieux with the first pick in the ensuing draft. Getting Jagr fifth overall in 1990 was a coup of epic proportions. The team’s last dry spell, right after the turn of the millennium, yielded kingmakers: Crosby and Malkin. A win over Nashville will cement theirs as the best era in Penguins history.

Crosby now occupies a space similar to LeBron James’ in the NBA. He isn’t what he once was, but he’s still better than everyone on the ice. His numbers aren’t what they once were, but they’re still consistently at the top of the game. Someone else can win MVP, but he has limited company in any “best player in the world” conversations.

Father Time is, indeed, undefeated. A day will come when Crosby isn’t Crosby. He had the worst spell of his career at the start of last season, before Mike Sullivan arrived as the Penguins’ coach, and that was worrisome. His history of concussions, the most recent coming in the second round this year, is mortifying. It’s looked at points like Crosby’s steep decline had arrived. Someday, it will.

But it’s not here yet. Crosby is different than he used to be, and he’s been better at points in the past. He’s now an old master and not a young one. But he’s still uniquely great.