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| The Crosby, Ovechkin debate has resurfaced. (Credits: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images) |
From 2007-2010, the NHL was blessed with a chance circumstance that every professional sports league desires: the Lionel Messi – Cristiano Ronaldo effect. Its two best players by popular consensus, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, played for two of its best teams, stirring a rivalry between Pittsburgh and Washington that crested in a seven-game playoff series in 2009. In that series, Crosby and Ovechkin traded blow for thunderous blow, even staging twin hat-tricks in game two, but it was Crosby’s Penguins who landed the last punch with a resounding 6-2 win in game seven.
The NHL, after that series, was in a comfortable place. It boasted two polarizing stars who relished competing against one another, whose standoff was so well-documented, so transcendent,it had the power to draw fans from other sports. This doesn’t happen often for the NHL, a league that struggles to market its big-name players the way the NFL and the NBA do. (Think LeBron – Durant; Brady – Manning.) But Crosby and Ovechkin were seen so unanimously as 1and 1a, people with little interest in saucer passes and toe drags we’re tuning in when Sid the Kid and the Great 8 locked horns simply because battles like theirs don’t come around all that often. It fell into that category of “must-watch” TV, where you sports soul literally compels you not to miss it.
Crosby and the Penguins went on to win the Stanley Cup that season, avenging a 2008 Stanley Cup loss to the Red Wings in the Finals. Crosby, constrained by the tight-checking of Henrik Zetterberg, had a relatively quiet series, but when he hoisted Lord Stanley June 12thin Hockeytown, there was no doubt it was his Cup, his team, and his League.
The next season, the League belonged to the Capitals. Led by Ovechkin’s 50 goals and 109 points, Washington steamrolled the Eastern Conference in 2009-10, finishing atop the standings with a gaudy 121 points. It was just the second 120-point season by a team in 15 years. After watching enviously the spring before as his nemesis scaled hockey’s highest peak, Ovechkin seemed poised to do the same just a year later.
But the Montreal Canadiens shocked the Capitals in the first round, ousting the Presidents Trophy winners in seven games. It was a flameout, if there ever was one, and the second high-stakes meltdown suffered by an Ovechkin-led team that year. In February at the Winter Olympics, a highly-touted Russia team squared off with Canada in the quarterfinals of the men’s hockey tournament, and were whitewashed by Crosby and Co., 7-3. Again, the win propelled Crosby’s team to immortality, as Canada went on to defeat the United States in the Gold Medal game, 3-2, on an overtime goal by you-know-exactly-who.
With a Stanley Cup and a gold medal to his name, Crosby was slowly separating himself from Ovechkin. Meanwhile, Ovechkin was falling back into the pack. In 2010-11, the Russian superstar scored just 32 goals and finished with 85 points. It was the first time in his career he scored less than 40 goals and 90 points in a season, and though Bruce Boudreau’s new defensive-minded philosophy had reined in the high-flying Caps, the fact that Ovechkin still led the League in shots suggested the chances were there. Washington’s first place finish in the East excused, even validated, Ovechkin’s offensive tumble, but when the Caps were swept by the fifth-seeded Lightning in the second round of the playoffs, there were no more alibi’s for the NHL’s two-time MVP.
Before dispatching the Capitals, the Lightning had taken care of the Penguins in the first round. But these weren’t Crosby’s Penguins; these hadn’t been Crosby’s Penguins since Sid suffered a concussion in the Winter Classic back in January. After taking a blindside shoulder to the head from David Steckel, Crosby’s magnificent season was stalled, then put on hold, then shelved for good. He would not play again for 10 months.
By the end of the 2011 season, the rhetoric surrounding Crosby and Ovechkin had definitively changed. In just two years, the combustible question of “Who’s better?” had given way to hollow contemplations of “Where has Ovechkin gone?” and “Will Crosby ever come back?”
The Messi – Ronaldo effect is so special because it is so rare. With the increasing rate of roster upheaval and the diminishing length of an athlete’s prime in this era of sports, to have the two best players in the world suiting up for two of the best teams in the world at the same time requires an alignment of the stars that would make any astrologist weak in the knees.
The NHL was fortunate to have it when they did, and certainly sucked all the nectar from it when they could. Even as Crosby raced out of the gate this season with 48 points in his first 30 games – a 90’s-like pace of 132 points in an 82-game season – Ovechkin’s torpid start suggested this flower was dry. The captain in Pittsburgh was simply that much better than his counterpart in Washington.
But just when Crosby thought the battle was over, just when he thought his archenemy was gone for good, Ovechkin has risen from the ashes, pulled himself out of the snow like the Huns in Mulan, and declared the game back on. (You can't tell me the Hun at :19 of that video doesn't bear striking resemblance to Ovechkin.) He has used a 10-goal month of April to vault over Steven Stamkos for the goal-scoring lead with 28, and more importantly, propelled the Capitals to third place in the East. Two months ago, Ovechkin was being discussed as the season’s biggest disappointment; now, he is being discussed as the season’s MVP.
His most immediate competitor? Sidney Crosby.
Now in fairness to Crosby, he had the Hart Memorial Trophy won back in February. He was putting up points at a video-game rate, and making the players around him infinitely better. )Whatever bonuses or raises Chris Kunitz and Pascal Dupuis receive this summer should be split in half and delivered to Crosby.) When Crosby took a puck to the mouth on March 30th– he has not played since – he had 56 points through 36 games, including a whopping 41 assists, and his Penguins sat atop the East with 54 points, seven points clear of second-place Montreal. His scoring pace was so furious, he has yet to relinquish the top spot on the leaderboard despite having missed nearly three weeks of action. If the season ended today, the MVP award would still be his.
But if Crosby fails to return before the end of the regular season, he will have missed 13 games – more than a quarter of this 48-game season. Whether a player who suits up for only three-quarters of his team’s games is worthy of the MVP or not is a tricky question. (The mere fact that it’s a discussion is a tribute to Crosby’s greatness.) What’s a whole lot clearer, is Ovechkin’s candidacy for the award.
11 games into this season, the Capitals were dead last in the East with a record of 2-8-1. They looked like a team unsure of themselves, following the lead of a Captain unsure of himself. Ovechkin had been swapped between right wing and left wing by coach Adam Oates, and the once inexorable goal-scorer looked uncertain, tentative, and perhaps worst of all, tractable. Ovechkin’s game has always been centered on a certain relentlessness, a type of furious energy that one might see in a wild animal resisting capture. There were ways to slow down the Great Ovechkin, but – outside of a few dozen tranquilizers – there was no way to stop him. At the start of this season, and through most of last year, he seemed to have lost that seething drive, and through the fist 11 games this year, he had just three goals and four assists for seven points.
Then, as if shot in the neck with enough adrenaline to teach a sloth how to sprint, Ovechkin woke up. Not coincidentally, the Capitals did too. Since Feb. 8, Ovechkin has 25 goals and 16 assists over 32 games. And as he rose up the stat boards, his team rose up the standings. Washington’s 22-9-1 record in the same time span has lifted them to third place in the East (thank you Southeast Division…), as they race toward the playoffs with dangerous confidence. Only two other teams in the NHL – the Penguins and the Blackhawks – have picked up more points than the Capitals since Feb. 8, and those two teams have more goal-scorers than they know what to do with.
The Capitals, on the other hand, go as Ovechkin goes, a burden of pressure that Crosby has never had to shoulder in Pittsburgh. With the likes of Evgeni Malkin, James Neal, Kris Letang and Jarome Iginla, among others, the Penguins have enough great players to soldier through one superstar’s drought relatively unscathed. Since Crosby was sidelined on March 30th, Pittsburgh has won six of its eight games, pumped in 25 goals and widened its Eastern Conference lead to nine points. The team lost the best player in the world, and hardly missed a beat.
Do you know what would happen if you removed Ovechkin from the Capitals’ lineup right now? The team’s intensity would plummet, their lethal power play would fizzle out, and Nicklas Backstrom would start passing the puck to advertisements on the boards because he expected Ovechkin to be there.
I’m not ready to say Ovechkin has caught up again with Crosby. Crosby has too often performed like a bantam in a mite’s league recently to make that claim true. But Ovechkin has surpassed Crosby in value to his team. The Penguins are fine without their captain; the Capitals are not. And when it comes to judging the MVP, isn’t that what matters? The size of the whole left by a player’s absence? The weight of their impact on their team’s success?
If you consider Ovechkin’s early-season sleep-in an “injury”, we have seen what the Capitals are without him. And we’ve gained the same glimpse into the Penguins with Crosby out now. We aren’t holding it against Crosby for playing on a spectacular team, and certainly in the long run, Pittsburgh isn’t going anywhere without him. But Washington wouldn’t even be talking about the long run if it weren’t for Ovechkin. The playoffs wouldn’t even be a discussion.
And speaking of long runs, here’s to celebrating the rebirth of this two-horse race. With Crosby returning to the ice soon and Ovechkin surging back to life, it appears there are still miles to go before this one is over.
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