PITTSBURGH — Connor McDavid isn’t far behind Sidney Crosby in the grand scheme of things, really.
Just three Stanley Cups, two Olympic gold medals, a Golden Goal and a whole lot of hardware. Not to mention more than 880 points.
But he’s also 9½ years younger than Sid the Kid, and McDavid does have one common opponent on his side.
“He’s probably the best player in the world right now,” Philadelphia Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds said of McDavid, after his team had beaten Edmonton 2-1 Saturday.
When the question is, “Name the best player in the National Hockey League,” it seems there are two names that eat up 90 per cent of the votes, a split that Auston Matthews will carve into, no doubt.
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For now, however, the hockey world gets Round 3 of Crosby-McDavid Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, the first of two meetings in a nine-day stretch between the Oilers and Penguins. They met twice in a pair of fabulous games last season, and the results pretty much sum up the narrative thus far.
McDavid had four points against the Penguins last season to lead both clubs in scoring, while Crosby had zero points against Edmonton. Pittsburgh, however, won both games — a 3-2 game in Pittsburgh where Benoit Pouliot fired the winner into his own net, and a 4-3 shootout that was the most entertaining regular season game played a Rogers Place last season.
“Both offensively and defensively, they were two really, really entertaining games,” said McDavid. “We only took one of the four points available so we’re looking for a better result obviously.”
There was a time when the “best player” argument encompassed Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, and the stark contrasts in their two personas made for easy distinction and great conversation.
It was a 50-goal winger versus a 70-assist centreman — Russian versus Canadian. Two superstars whose teams met nearly every spring, with the same, predictable result that proved one a winner, and leaves us to wonder about whether the other’s time will ever come.
Today, the Crosby-McDavid comparison is more like buying a puppy. You know, the way you look at the adult male for clues on how your new dog might turn out once he’s grown up.
McDavid is Crosby’s mini-me: Quiet spoken; humble to a fault; hockey’s “chosen one” since he was bantam aged.
McDavid passes first and shoots later, but spoke earlier this season about how he’d like to score more, and who he’s been studying to make that happen.
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“I’ve never been one of those goal scorers, that guy who goals come easy to,” McDavid admitted early in October. “I (score) more on the rush, more opportunistic. Whereas … Sid scores on plays in front of the net. I’ve got to find ways to score like that.
“A rebound, a shot off the pad, and you’re arriving on time. He’s always in the right spot at the right time. The puck seems to sit there, but it’s not by accident. It’s not a coincidence.”
Crosby, of course, doesn’t see himself as a teacher. Like the rest of us, the longer we spend around the game the more we realize we don’t know. Particularly on the topic of dealing with a playoff hangover, as his 5-3-1 Penguins struggle along against the 2-5 Oilers.
“We’ve lost 10-1 and 7-1, so we still haven’t found the answer. We’re looking for it, too,” Crosby said from his stall inside the Penguins practice rink on Monday. “You’ve got to find that (playoff) level again, and you quickly realize that it doesn’t come overnight. You’ve got to build those things all over again, and you’re not going to feel like you did in the second week of June, in October. It’s just not the way it works.”
So while the hockey world tunes in on a Tuesday night for that semi-annual matchup of the game’s two top superstars, the players themselves are just trying to figure out some consistency in their team games. For Crosby, these kinds of marquee games are old hat.
For McDavid, he’s not that far removed from tuning in himself, trying to steal a trick or two from Crosby’s bag of wizardry.
“It’s your job to defend him now,” McDavid said. “You’re hoping for him to do something cool, but when you’re playing against him you’re not hoping that. Obviously, it’s a little different.”
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