If Alex Ovechkin is Washington’s most beloved athlete, then Sidney Crosby is the most hated.
But there’s one thing even the most die-hard Capitals fans cannot deny about the Pittsburgh Penguins captain: He’s a generational talent and, after leading his team to the Stanley Cup in June, he has toiled to transform himself into an even better player than he was last May, when he doused Washington’s Stanley Cup dreams in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Already celebrated as one of the game’s best passers, Crosby, whose Penguins visit Verizon Center on Sunday in a pre-Super Bowl showdown, has added a new wrinkle to his game this season. The 22-year-old center is shooting more and shooting to score and, as result, ranks third in goals, just one behind Ovechkin and San Jose’s Patrick Marleau. With 37 goals through Saturday’s games, Crosby is on pace for 53, which would be 20 more goals than the 33 he averaged during his first four NHL seasons.
“I have some good speed and can create some chances that way,” he said. “But I’m not going to overpower guys all the time. If you have a good shot, you can be effective even from areas that might not typically be great scoring areas. If you can be dangerous there, then you keep guys guessing.”
Despite a debilitating snowstorm that struck the Washington region Friday and Saturday, league officials anticipated that Sunday’s game — advertised as the league’s marquee matchup and set to air on NBC — would go on as scheduled. After losing, 5-3, in Montreal on Saturday, Crosby and the Penguins planned to fly to Newark and then take a bus to get to Washington in time to face the Capitals, who are riding a 13-game winning streak.
Although the Capitals have only faced Pittsburgh once this season, a 6-3 win on Jan. 21, Coach Bruce Boudreau has seen enough highlights of Crosby scoring goals to know that he’s a more complete player than in the past.
“Sidney looked and said, ‘You know what? I’m already doing everything,’” Boudreau said. “Former MVP. Won the Cup. But I think I can score more goals. How do I go about that? It takes a rare person to be that smart, to say, ‘You know what? I’m going to take a 100 more shots a year, and if I can already get 30 goals, I can get 50 with another 100 shots.’ ”
Crosby’s prodigious talent was obvious almost from the first time he skated as a 3-year-old. What became evident a few years later, his father Troy Crosby said, was something else that can’t be taught: an insatiable desire to be the best.
“He’s always been that way,” said Troy, who is a fixture most nights at Mellon Arena. “Whether it was a mistake he made in a game, a shot on a goal that didn’t go in, or he didn’t receive a pass properly, or he fanned on a shot, he would work on it after practice.”
The elder Crosby, a former goaltender, won a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League championship with Verdun and was drafted 240th overall by the Montreal Canadiens in 1984. He fell short of his goal of playing in the NHL but remained enthusiastic about the game. He has lived out that passion through his son, who spent his peewee years in the basement of the family home in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, shooting pucks into a clothes dryer and busting it up so badly it looked “like a Dalmatian dog,” Troy said.
Four and half years after he was drafted first overall by the Penguins, the impact Crosby has had on the once-troubled franchise is impossible to ignore. In fact, the evidence is several stories tall and sits across the street from the team’s decrepit arena. Consol Energy Center, a dazzling $321 million glass-and-red-brick arena, is scheduled to open in time for the start of next season.
“It’s appropriate that he lives at [team owner and hockey legend] Mario Lemieux’s house because he saved the Penguins at least three times, and Sidney Crosby has saved them at least once in his career,” NBC analyst Pierre McGuire said. “He won’t have to do it again because that’s how good the team will be while he is there.”
