PITTSBURGH – We are occasionally guilty of getting ahead of ourselves.
For in the rush to identify and embrace the next best thing it is easy to overlook that which you have known for so long. Yes, even amongst a sea-changing youth movement the NHL remains Sidney Crosby’s domain.
The Pittsburgh Penguins captain is still king.
And yet with Connor McDavid’s Edmonton Oilers in town on Tuesday night we will have an opportunity to see Crosby in a slightly different light. As elder statesman. It will mark the first time the 29-year-old has ever stepped on the ice with a teenager that most expect to take up his mantle as the game’s best.
“I’m old,” Crosby joked Monday. “I’m old.”
This meeting would have happened a year ago if not for the broken collarbone that interrupted McDavid’s rookie season.
It arrives now with Crosby peering out from the top of the mountain. He’s won a Stanley Cup and a World Cup in the last five months and was named MVP after lifting both trophies. He was shot out of a cannon to start this season with eight eye-popping goals in six games, and no one’s batted an eye.
“What we see from him is what we always see from him,” said Penguins coach Mike Sullivan. “Nothing surprises us. He’s just a great player, I don’t know how else to say it.
“I think we’ve grown to expect it out of him.”
Crosby is one of the few who understands what it’s like to shoulder the expectations now being placed on McDavid. They both found the national spotlight long before being selected first overall in the NHL draft, and were both named captain of a sagging franchise at age 19.
To continue charting the comparison from there borders on unfair – although some, including Wayne Gretzky, believe McDavid can handle it.
Crosby won the scoring title with a career-best 120 points in his second NHL season and took home the Hart Trophy as league MVP. McDavid is off to a fine start in his second year with 14 points in 13 games so far, but the bar has been set awfully high by No. 87.
“If you can have half his success or even a quarter of his success, I think that’s a pretty amazing career,” McDavid told NHL.com recently. “He’s won basically everything there is to win.”
Even though they’ve never faced each other on the ice, they’ve spent some time together.
McDavid made the 200-kilometre trek here from Erie, Pa., while playing for the Ontario Hockey League’s Otters a couple years back and stopped by the Penguins dressing room during that visit. He also posed for a photo with Crosby and Gretzky at Hockey Canada’s championship banquet in 2015 – the kind of shot that might one day find a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
However, Crosby has given his countryman space to carve out his own path. He’s not particularly big on offering up advice.
“I think everybody has to do what works for them,” said Crosby. “Obviously when you’re young you might have questions, but I think guys have enough players on their own teams that they can seek advice from. I think the biggest thing is just learning on the fly and seeing what works for you.
“It depends on your personality, that kind of thing, but I think the most important thing is you remember what got you to this point and trust that it will give you success.”
McDavid was just 12 years old when Crosby became the youngest captain in NHL history to lift the Stanley Cup. He idolized the Penguins star as young boy growing up in Newmarket, Ont.
That alone will make Tuesday a special night for the 19-year-old centre, who will no doubt find himself taking a faceoff across from Crosby at some point during the game.
An injury kept Crosby from facing his idol early in his NHL career, but he can still identify with the emotions McDavid will likely be experiencing at PPG Paints Arena.
“I always wanted to play against Steve Yzerman,” he said. “I think unfortunately he got hurt the game before I ended up playing against the Wings that time, so I didn’t end up playing against him. But Peter Forsberg was another guy that growing up I really liked to watch. I got a pretty hard lesson; I think one of the first couple times I played him I was minus-5, so I think I was watching him a little too much that night.
“We saw them a lot – you played your divisional teams eight times (back then) and he was in Philly – so I saw him a lot and learned pretty quick that now I’ve got to compete against him, not necessarily watch him.”
In sports, time seems to go by in the blink of an eye.
Gretzky recently spoke of how quickly he went from being compared to Marcel Dionne and Guy Lafleur to being asked about a young up-and-comer named Mario Lemieux.
Now it is Crosby who is fielding questions about the circle of life. He is still the alpha dog at the outset of his 12th NHL season – and with the 1,000-point milestone looming in the months ahead – but he’ll share the ice with the Next One on Tuesday.
“It changes, that’s life,” said Crosby. “I think it’s a challenge either way and you get excited for that competition. Yeah, I think you’re used to being on the other side of (the comparisons).
“It’s kind of different.”
