Secret to Crosby’s greatness: Work
Saturday afternoon, Sidney Crosby walked on skates from the practice ice into the cramped visiting locker-room at Capital One Arena and placed his black CCM stick into a rack, jiggling it until it fit. He navigated a horde of notebooks and cameras in front of his locker, sat down and pulled on a black Pittsburgh Penguins cap.
At the end of a brief media scrum, a question — one he was perhaps more qualified to answer than anyone on the planet — made Crosby pause: Did he believe hockey instinct could be honed through repetition? “Mmm,” Crosby said. “Maybe.”
He mulled his answer, a clue to how one of the greatest hockey players ever views the game. Crosby, 30, is playing at his highest level in these Stanley Cup playoffs, having recorded seven goals and eight assists in eight games, controlling games either through muscular stickhandling or planting himself in front of the net. All four Penguins goals in their second-round series against the Washington Capitals, which heads back to Pittsburgh tied at 1, have come with Crosby on the ice. If the Penguins win a third straight Stanley Cup — a distinction no team has earned since the New York Islanders captured their fourth consecutive title 35 years ago — Crosby will again be the engine.
Having overcome the concussion scares of his mid-20s, Crosby has reached the apex of North American sports, a player so embedded at the top of his game and so regularly excellent that it becomes tempting to take him for granted or look past him at newer, fresher stars. Crosby often ends up on a secondary tier of the hockey world’s consciousness. Edmonton’s Connor McDavid, 21, won last year’s Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player. Auston Matthews, 20, is the face of one of the National Hockey League’s most storied franchise, the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The sport is growing faster and younger, and Crosby is doing neither, probably in the former case and certainly in the latter. Still, those inside the game have no doubts about his eminence. Like baseball’s Mike Trout, Crosby is a metronomic exemplar of all-around skill. Like basketball’s LeBron James, he has established all-time-great bona fides as he remains at the crest of his performance.
“The last couple seasons, he’s been the best player,” Capitals defenceman Matt Niskanen said.
“I truly believe he’s the best player in the world,” NBC analyst Jeremy Roenick said.
“Still the best guy in the league,” former teammate Brooks Orpik said.
The quality that allows Crosby to remain atop the league, coaches and teammates say, is his unique work ethic, an ability to specify subtle areas for improvement and work with meticulous precision until they match the other elite elements of his game. While his natural ability — powerful skating, pistol-quick hands, uncommon feel — made him a phenom, his creative, distinct capacity for work has enabled him to stay atop the NHL.
“He’s a generational talent,” Penguins Coach Mike Sullivan said. “He does things that you can’t teach, and that’s part of what makes him what he is. What separates him from other elite players is his appetite to be the best and his willingness and his drive to be the best.”
Craig Adams, now retired, arrived in Pittsburgh in 2009 and practised in the same positional group with Crosby for six-plus seasons. When he first came to Pittsburgh, he appreciated that Crosby worked hard. But, well, it was the NHL; everybody worked hard. “It doesn’t make you special,” Adams said. The specificity of Crosby’s work struck him. He noticed a habit: If Crosby missed a scoring chance one night, he would replicate the situation the next day in practice.
“He’s able to pick things he thinks he needs to get better at, and he’s very deliberate at practicing those things and working on those things all the time,” Adams said.
“He’s methodical about doing that on a daily basis.”
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Former Penguins coach Dan Bylsma recalled one night when a puck bounced off the end boards and toward Crosby, standing in front of the net. Crosby missed the scoring chance, and it ate at him. The next day, Crosby discussed the play with coaches, then asked for pucks to be smacked off the end boards in identical fashion.
“He’ll do it 100 times, until it becomes second nature,” former teammate Pascal Dupuis said. “Trust me, he can analyze his own game better than anybody else. When he sees something of his own game that’s not where he thinks it should be, he works on it and works on it until he gets really good at it. As far as him getting better, I’ve never seen anybody else doing it that way.”
For Crosby, the idea to re-create game situations in extreme detail came naturally. Missed chances gnawed at him, and through specific work he ironed perceived flaws.
“I don’t know if you call it a mistake, or you call it something you wish you could do over again, but yeah, he’s always done that,” Troy Crosby, Sidney’s father, said Saturday afternoon while lingering outside the Penguins’ locker-room at Capital One Arena. “For a long time he’s done that, ever since he was a kid. For as long as I can remember.”
“It’s an instinctive game,” Crosby said. “Sometimes, things come easier than others. Just being aware of what those are, the areas you’re not comfortable or don’t feel as comfortable in, you just try and develop those things. It’s not something you think about or pick apart. It seems to come pretty naturally. If you play that many games over the course of the year, you kind of get reoccurring things.”
Early in his career, Crosby racked up assists with modest goal totals, so he started arriving 10 to 15 minutes early for practice to rip shots from specific spots on the ice. The next year, he led the league in goals. In his first three seasons, he sat in on penalty-kill meetings, even though he was not on the penalty kill — he wanted to be ready, just in case. One year, he decided he needed to improve on the draw. he became one of the best in the league.
“He’s made a ton of changes,” said Capitals centre Jay Beagle, a frequent faceoff foil of Crosby’s. “I mean, it’s no surprise that if he doesn’t like a little part of his game, he’s going to come back the next year better.”
“He’s still the hardest-working guy I’ve ever played with,” said Orpik, now a Capitals defenceman. “That’s probably the one thing that people overlook — how he achieves his success. A lot of guys are just naturally gifted. He obviously has a lot of natural gifts. But I mean, I’ve never seen someone as committed to getting better as him.”
Late this season and into the playoffs, Crosby scored a spate of fall-off-your-couch-and-scream goals, whacking pucks out of the air and past goalies, in one instance after an aerial tip to himself. They appeared to be feats of improvisational genius, the product of instinct and divine handeye coordination. To an extent, perhaps, they were. “I don’t know,” Crosby said. “It’s just instincts.”
Teammates believe otherwise. Bylsma remembered watching Crosby work on batting pucks and said the chances the goals were a result of practice was “100 per cent.”
“He does practice weird stuff like that,” Niskanen said. “He’s naturally very intelligent. Really, I think his on-ice awareness is so high, he knows where the puck is at all times. A lot of guys don’t have the awareness to even try to something like that.”
Orpik remembered how Crosby would ask teammates to stand in the corners and rifle waisthigh shots toward him as he stood near the net. When the pucks flew at him, Crosby would use the shaft of his stick to knock them into the net, like a bunt in baseball.
“Just stupid little stuff like that,” Orpik said. “You would think it would never happen in a game. He would work on it for hours at a time if it meant he would score one goal that way ... A lot of people label it as lucky. With him, guys that practice with him know there’s not a lot of luck involved there.”
Of course, if you are going to target a specific skill to improve, it helps to be Sidney Crosby. His creativity allows him to create and execute plays in practice that others cannot.
“I try to do a couple of drills, where he’s like on the goal line, and there’s a shot coming, and he deflects it under the bar,” Pittsburgh winger Tom Kuhnhackl said. “We’ve tried that a bunch of times. It’s either up somewhere on the rafters or it’s on the ice. I’ve never even managed to get it on net.”
So those extra hours create instinct? Or does instinct make the hours pay off ?
“It’s got to be both,” Crosby said.