STICK TALK WITH SID

FROM ONE OF THE GAME’S GREATEST, THOUGHTS ON BLADES, CURVES AND THE EVOLUTION OF A PLAYER’S MOST IMPORTANT TOOL “My cousin would send me blades. The good thing was he used a pretty straight [blade]. But you could curve them. So even if the curve was a lit

Sidney Crosby ducked into an empty dressing room at the Ice Den rink in Coral Springs, Fla. He carefully leaned his two practice twigs on the stick rack then took a seat. He anxiously eyed up the pesky reporter who waited him out.

This was deadline day, with trade rumors still swirling around the Penguins. Some teammates were already on the two buses humming out back, nervously checking their phones. Crosby braced for questions about the club’s direction.

He let his guard down and flashed a grin when he heard the topic of the day.

“No problem,” the future Hall of Famer said. “Always love talking about sticks.”

And that’s a good thing, because no NHLer encounters more fascination over the shape and pattern of his stick from fans, media and even his fellow players. Just last month at the All-Star festivities, young Dallas sniper Jason Robertson gushed that he couldn’t wait to check out Crosby’s signature curve.

But how did Crosby come to bend his stick blade like that, flat from the heel to the middle of the blade then barely twisting to open up ever so slightly? We asked him to reminisce about his very first stick and how it evolved from there.

Like most players from his generation, Crosby’s first one was a hand-me-down. His dad, Troy, cut one of his lefty sticks down and handed it to the boy.

“The blade was almost as long as the shaft of the stick,” Sid said with a laugh.

He fondly remembered two of his first sticks, both wooden. One was a white and blue Canadian. The other was a Titan model. He thinks that one was red.

His first composite stick was an Easton, made out of aluminum. He still shakes his head in disbelief thinking how heavy that was compared to today’s twigs.

“It was like the Gretzky silver one, but it was red,” he said. “I was about 12.”

He switched to an Easton Z-Bubble in his early teens. Then Forbes MacPherson, a cousin who played with the Shreveport Mudbugs of the Central Hockey League, shipped him a Branches shaft that was the stiffest he has ever used.

“My cousin would send me blades. The good thing was he used a pretty straight [blade]. But you could curve them,” Crosby said. “So even if the curve was a little big, you could straighten it out. I would just curve them on our stove.”

Crosby was rocking a Clarke or Modano curve then. Dating to his first years on the ice, he has always preferred a blade that was just slightly curved.

At times, he “messed around” with bigger curves that make it easier to execute toe drags and whip harder wrist shots on net. But he soon switched back.

“It’s just something that I became so used to,” he said. “It is unique, and obviously I’m comfortable on my backhand. That’s a big reason why I’ve used it.”

Relatively speaking, his stick hasn’t evolved much during his 18-year career. That won’t surprise hardcore hockey fans who know he has worn the same jockstrap his whole career and has yet to convert to removable skate blades.

He used a two-piece SherWood stick with a wooden blade in his first few seasons and was one of the league’s last adopters of the one-piece technology that is the norm today. He finally made the switch, with much fanfare, in 2009.

His blade is basically the same. In the past, he tinkered with the lie of his stick but said that threw off all of his mechanics. One change that stuck was he went down a little bit in shaft stiffness over the years, from 110 to near 100 now.

“As far as the flex and the lie, taking faceoffs has a lot to do with that. So there’s a lot of reasons. It’s not just stick-handling or shooting or one specific thing. There’s a lot that goes into it,” he said. “So it’s not easy to change at this point.”

He has used a CCM Ribcor Reckoner for several years now, resisting the urge to upgrade to newer models. But those snazzy sticks have caught his eye.

“Trust me,” Crosby said, “when I see some of the guys shoot and see the different flexes and the kick points and all the technology that’s in sticks now, it’s hard not to want to play with it a little bit. Yeah, it has really come a long way.”

Crosby gets a kick out of the obsession over his sticks. But when people ask him about that curve, he is always up for talking about this tools of the trade.

“To me, it’s just normal. But it’s funny to see other guys react to it or ask how I use that,” he said. “A lot of guys now use a very similar curve. There’s a couple different ones, but a lot of guys use similar stick curves that they grew up with.”