Two moments stick most with Sidney Crosby from the last two years — arguably the best 24 months of his professional life.
Well, two moments that are basically one and the same.
With the clock ticking down in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final, Crosby is helping the Penguins protect a lead in their defensive zone. The puck pops out to center ice, one of his Swedish teammates picks it up and puts it in the empty net to seal a championship.
In 2016, it was Patric Hornqvist in San Jose. In 2017, it was Carl Hagelin in Nashville.
“I was kind of in the exact same spot on both,” Crosby said. “Each of them getting those empty-netters and knowing that you can kind of exhale. We did it. That moment before the big celebratory moment, that was really special. I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing Horny crying on the bench after that goal. That to me, I just won’t ever forget that. That was just raw emotion.”
He would never say it, but those moments would not have been possible without Crosby’s leadership, work ethic and natural hockey ability. While it certainly took a pair of remarkable Penguins
teams to capture back-to-back Stanley Cup titles — the first time an NHL team has done so in nearly 20 years — it all starts with a remarkable captain.
For leading the Penguins on a successful Stanley Cup defense, something often deemed near-impossible in the league’s salary cap era, Crosby has been named the 2017 Dapper Dan Sportsman of the Year.
This is Crosby’s third time receiving the honor, but it could hardly be more different than the first two, which came — fittingly — back-to-back in 2006 and 2007.
Crosby was introduced at that first Dapper Dan banquet by then-roommate and linemate Mark Recchi. Now, Recchi is one of the Penguins’ assistant coaches.
Back then, Crosby was a fresh-faced teenager, tasked with rejuvenating one of the NHL’s most run-down franchises with an uncertain future. He, along with teammates Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Marc-Andre Fleury and Jordan Staal, was supposed to usher in a new era of Penguins hockey.
“It has really made me think back a bit,” Crosby said. “I didn’t know if we were going to Kansas City. There were so many things that could’ve gone different ways.
“Here we are, these young guys. Geno, Tanger, Flower, Staalsy. We were just trying to see what we could do, see if we could meet the expectations.”
In the 11 years since, Crosby and his teammates have done that, and then some. Personally, Crosby has won three Stanley Cups, two Conn Smythe trophies, two Olympic gold medals and one World Cup of Hockey. Safe to say the expectations have been met.
None of those may have been more hardly-earned than this most recent Cup, though. The challenges for defending champions — fatigue, the salary cap, and parity in the league — were well-established. There was a reason no team had won back-to-back Cups since the 1997 and 1998 Red Wings.
“It was just trying to take it a game at a time,” Crosby said. “Everyone says that, but it really was the best thing for us. We had injuries. Every game, you’re playing every team’s best. There’s no real easy way around it. That kind of approach was really important for us.”
As Crosby admitted, the answer is cliche, but it fits this group of Penguins. In 2016, they blitzed through the playoffs, overwhelming teams with their speed. In 2017, they fought to basically just be the last team standing.
“We just felt like in the games the previous year, we were going to outshoot teams, we were going to out-chance them,” Crosby said. “It just came down to execution. I felt like last year, we probably didn’t outshoot teams as much, we didn’t necessarily out-chance them. We just made big plays in key times.
“We had guys blocking shots, guys out of the lineup, different guys in the lineup. I think we probably used 30 different players. It was incredible. Just kind of a difference. We weren’t necessarily outplaying teams all the time, but we were winning.”
That type of Cup run might seem like it would take a bit more leadership from the man wearing the ‘C’ on his chest, but Crosby, unsurprisingly, spread the credit across the dressing room.
Ask his teammates and coaches, though, and there’s no question where it all starts.
“He’s certainly the engine that drives this team,” defenseman Ian Cole said. “The confidence that he showed all the time, but especially through that [Cup] run, was something the whole team feeds off of. When things were hard and times were tough, and we needed a surge or a handhold to claw our way back in, his confidence and his play was certainly that.”
“It starts with Sid, our captain,” coach Mike Sullivan said in his press conference after Game 6 in Nashville. “He’s just such a terrific person and has such an appetite to win. I think it’s really contagious amongst our group.”
That Stanley Cup gave Crosby three titles for his career, one more than his mentor, landlord and boss, Mario Lemieux. Crosby doesn’t like to compare himself to Lemieux — “There’s not going to ever be another Mario,” he said — but sometimes it’s impossible not to.
They both lifted Pittsburgh hockey out of some dark times, overcame serious injury issues to win championships and, now, have back-to-back titles on their resume.
In Sullivan’s post-Game 6 press conference, he wasn’t shy about where he thought Crosby belonged in the pantheon of hockey greats.
“I don’t know that I’ve bene around a hockey player that has the work ethic that Sid has,” Sullivan said. “He has a willingness to go the extra mile, to control what he can to be the very best, and he cares so much for this team and this organization and helping us win. So that being said, I have to believe that it would be hard not to have him in that conversation of the all-time greats.”
Now 30 and probably entering the back end of his career, Crosby has started thinking about what the future holds.
“The league’s not getting any older,” he joked.
He’s not planning on hanging up his skates any time soon, and watching him play, it certainly doesn’t look like he needs to. But when he does eventually call it a career, he has a simple desire for how people look back on his legacy.
“Hopefully just somebody who was a good teammate, came to the rink everyday, worked hard, showed that passion and tried to represent the city as best I can,” he said. “That’s really the most important thing to me. I think just the passion I have for the game and the love I have for the game, hopefully people can see that with the way I play and teammates see that with the way I am at the rink, the way I treat them.
“That’s all I can really think of when I think about legacy or if I want to be remembered. If that’s how it is, then I’d say I’d be really happy with that.”
Dapper Dan ticket information: https://dapperdan18.auction-bid.org/microsite/
First Published: January 28, 2018, 11:00 a.m.