Sidney Crosby

OK, maybe a site called Best Player in the World shouldn’t waste its readers’ time on the antics of a hired thug like Matt Cooke. But because the best hockey player in the world – Cooke’s Pittsburgh Penguins teammate Sidney Crosby – has missed the second half of the season with a concussion, and because the NHL itself is fast losing fans and credibility because of its antediluvian and flat-out brain-dead refusal to ban hits to the head (along with fighting, its other stone-age feature), this latest bit of goonery by Cooke needs to be considered.

Here’s the NHL’s dirtiest cheap-shot artist at work:

So the NHL has suspended Cooke for the remainder of the season (10 games) and the first round of the playoffs. Bravo. But what happens beyond this is even more interesting. Since Pens’ owner Mario Lemieux has spoken out strongly against hits like the ones that killed Crosby’s season, what he and GM Ray Shero do with Cooke now will tell the world whether their complaining was really about head hits or, instead, about the Pens losing Crosby.

What Lemieux should do with Cooke is cut him loose. Period. That means send him to the hell that is Wilkes-Barre (the Penguins’ minor-league affiliate), or buy out his contract, or suspend him indefinitely and pay him however much the NHL Players’ Association demands. Do whatever it takes to unload the guy who (with this, his FIFTH suspension for violence) has become the worst example of a league way out of step with the way the rest of the sports world is moving.

Because of the way the NHL has so far “disciplined” itself, hockey fans are left watching games featuring guys like Matt Cooke while guys like Crosby and Marc Savard sit out. Sweet jesus, how dumb is that. And even if you, like we, recognize that the NHL is run by a bunch of craven, self-serving gents who care WAY more about how & why the money rolls in than they care about good fast hockey, and care for the safety of the players even less…well, like it or not, the NHL is the world’s premier league, and the rest of the hockey world rightly or wrongly takes its cues from whatever the NHL does.

So the moment the NHL decides its friggin’ sacred ticketing, TV, and sponsorship revenue stream is finally at risk because of crap like guys running at each others’ heads and dropping the gloves to fight each other – the moment the NHL finally gets rid of guys like Cooke, Sean Avery, Daniel Carcillo, and all the other cheap-shot artists and “enforcers” who shouldn’t have jobs playing pro sports – that’s the moment that every other hockey league in the world will also take similar steps. In a year or so, eleven-year-old kids everywhere won’t have to listen to their misguided coaches exhorting them to “stand that guy up” or “finish checks” and will instead be able to play fast, intense, tough hockey with a focus on skating, passing, shooting and winning games with drive & skill.

And the result? Hockey every day like the stuff we see once a year, or once every four years, at the Worlds or the Olympics.

C’mon, Mario – step up. Do the right thing. Get rid of Cooke for good.

Tagged as: Sidney Crosby

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Legacy of the 2011 "Winter Classic"? Losing the sport's best player for over a month

Sidney Crosby has been cleared to resume light skating, but is probably still some way from returning to the Penguins’ lineup. And after that – who knows how he’ll perform? Even for the best player in the world, coming back in top form will be impossible – in this case, especially so, since Sid’s basically been sitting on his butt since January 5, when he left the ice with a concussion.

Put aside whatever you may think about the place of physical play and aggression in hockey. Put aside Gary Bettman’s tired rhetoric, and even put aside Eric Staal and Jonathan Toews’ legit concern about removing an essential component of the sport… All these are acceptable arguments. (OK, not the marionette Bettman’s, but the others, then.) No matter – if you look at this issue from a purely economic standpoint – something the NHL owners and general managers are usually only too keen to do – it just doesn’t make sense to have your best players potentially sitting out because of blind-side head shots.

Yes, Crosby got hit with head shots. Maybe accidental, maybe not. Who cares? They were head shots all the same. In hockey, if you trip a guy, you go to the penalty box. The intention is irrelevant; only the result matters. Same thing if you go into the corner with your stick up. You whack a guy with your stick, you’re gone. He bleeds, you’re gone for longer. You have to control your stick – it’s simple.

It’s also simple to penalize head shots. You make contact with a guy’s head, you’re gone. Doesn’t matter whether the contact was accidental or not. You control your shoulder, elbow, back, whatever, just as you control your stick. If a guy intentionally puts his head in the way of your shoulder, then he’s gone. There’s already a rule in the books for diving. The refs don’t often call it, but they could. Until the lockout, refs didn’t use to call cheap interference, hooking, or holding either. They started in 2005, and the game is way better now than it was back in the days when Mario Lemieux could retire out of frustration and Claude Lemieux could win the Conn Smythe trophy.

So Crosby’s been sitting out, and the guys who hit him are playing. How many fans do we think actually pay to see David Steckel or Viktor Hedman play? Wonder how Steckel and Hedman jersey sales are tracking? It’s not that either hit was especially dirty, or that these two guys are known for this kind of thing (unlike Crosby’s teammate, Matt Cooke). It’s just that, well, from a business standpoint, here’s the NHL’s chief marketable asset sidelined for a dumb reason. And it’ll keep happening, as Rule 48′s toothless application has seen an increase in overall NHL concussions this season.

Look around, look back. Marc Savard’s done. Paul Kariya never recovered. Eric Lindros had his career cut short early, and so did Keith Primeau. Ditto Geoff Courtnall and Pat Lafontaine. Who’s next? Stamkos? St-Louis? Sedin? You take too many of these guys out of action and the NHL will be exposed as the inflated refuge of too many mediocre pros that it is.

Here’s how Hall-of-Famer Lanny McDonald sees it: “When you start losing the best players in the game, like a Marc Savard, like a (Patrice) Bergeron, like Sidney Crosby, for extended periods of time, holy God, get your head out of the sand, wake up. It is a tough game and they’re trying to address it but it seems like they waited too long.”

And, as Lanny knows, you can play physical hockey without contact to the head. It’s definitely doable. Keep your shoulders & elbows down when you hit a guy, and don’t go headhunting. Other pro leagues play this way, and they don’t have the same ratio of concussions as the NHL does. Or have their top draws sitting out with completely preventable injuries.

As for the NHL: take out the head shots, take away 1/3 of the teams, and take away about 3 months of the season – and then you’d have a sport worth watching again.

Postscript – wonder what’s with all the Crosby haters lurking in the Comments section of every online news forum covering this story? It’s amazing how many commenters post mindless crap like “man up, Crosby” and “Crosby’s a baby” and so on. Unbelievable. Anyone who’s played serious sport for more than 5 minutes – any sport – will understand that Crosby’s one of the toughest competitors in the NHL. Love to see any of these commenters hiding behind the anonymity of an online identity go into the corner with Crosby. I mean really… “man up”?

Tagged as: Sidney Crosby

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Crosby: playing at a different level than everyone else in the league

As 2010 wraps up, there can be no doubt who is the best ice hockey player in the world. Sidney Crosby is destroying opposing teams and, for now, any comparisons between him and Ovechkin, Stamkos, Toews, Lidstrom, Sedin, or any other erstwhile contenders for Best Player honours.

Crosby is riding a 23-game point streak during which he’s scored an incredible 23 goals and 21 assists – a 160-point-season pace that hasn’t been seen since the glory years of Gretzky, Lemieux, and teams that played primarily to score v to prevent others from scoring. In an article from the Toronto Sun, journalist Bruce Garrioch cites a media agency poll that puts Sid ahead of Ovie and everyone else as the world’s best player this year.

Crosby is racking up all these points while playing alongside Chris Kunitz and Pascal Dupuis – solid guys, for sure, but not offensive artistes in the mold of, say, Ovechkin’s linemate Nik Backstrom or Henrik & Daniel Sedin. So the Kid is generating much of this offense himself, while being the #1 marked man in the league.

What’s even more important than the points streak, though, is how Crosby has carried the Penguins to the top of the league with his play. His streak has coincided with an amazing run for the Pens over the last 20 games – they now sit first in the entire NHL.

So…anyone willing to vote against the grain right now? We repeat our BP hockey poll: do you agree that Crosby is the best these days, or do you favour another star whose true value we haven’t yet seen this year? Vote over in the sidebar and join the conversation.

Tagged as: Sidney Crosby

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