Because of his longstanding love of backhand shots and passes, the blade of Sidney Crosby's stick is kept so straight that he could probably flip pancakes with the thing. Or carry around a glass of wine. Or putt on the 12th hole at Augusta National.
But let's get to the point, because this blade's also got quite the point.
"It's so straight that Sid can do a lot of things with that blade that you might not see other players do," Dana Heinze, the Penguins' equipment manager, was telling me late Saturday night. "You'll see him think a lot of things that you might not see other players think."
Again, he means.
Yet again ...
https://vimeo.com/193210622
Yeah, wow.
Set aside, if that's even possible anymore, the great goaltending debate. Set aside that the Penguins squandered a second-period lead or that they needed 49 shots to beat a backup at the other end. Set aside even the positives, such as that goal up there coming with 14 seconds left in regulation or Kris Letang's riveting shootout backhander that took down the Devils, 4-3, at PPG Paints Arena.
Set aside any and all fussy elements, set aside the forest for the trees, and seriously square up with what's really at hand here: The world's greatest hockey player is performing at his career peak.
This ... not the pre-concussion Sid, not the Sochi Sid, not even the Stanley Cup Sid ... this is the best Sidney Crosby's ever been.
Because the highest achievement in hockey, at its simplest core, is scoring a goal. And this supernaturally talented young man, given the buildup that's come over several months and culminated in a championship, is doing that right now -- 15 goals in 16 games, most in the NHL even though he missed six games to another concussion -- is doing that at a height he's never known.
That's what was witnessed on this night by the 18,615 crammed into this place, and its timeliness shouldn't for a split-second overshadow the talent involved.
"It's a perfect play, a perfect goal," Evgeni Malkin would tell me. "By a perfect player."
He could have meant the shot.
Keith Kinkaid's a big dude, his 6-foot-3 frame consuming most of the New Jersey net, and he'd finish with 46 saves on merit, being challenged side-to-side so often that his teammate, Ben Lovejoy, would later marvel at "what a gamer that guy is" because of how hard he competed amid all that movement. But Crosby's shot wasn't going to be stopped. It rifled over Kinkaid's left shoulder and banged off the upper back bar with blink-and-miss-it velocity.
Very nice. But it misses, quite literally in this case, the point.
When a shooter pulls the puck back toward his body, it's commonly called the toe-drag. Not many can do it with extreme precision, and I might limit that field among current players to the Red Wings' Henrik Zetterberg, the Blackhawks' Patrick Kane and, of course, Malkin's goal-of-the-year gem against Minnesota last winter:
https://vimeo.com/193212191
I'm really dating myself here, but one of the best I can recall at the toe-drag in a Pittsburgh sweater was Mike Bullard, a 50-goal sniper in the early 1980s who was so adept he could glide backward across the slot and pretty much pick his shooting lane.
The best?
Come on, never overthink a question like that ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWy5qmNUZMo&t=3m22s
Comparing Crosby to any of them is difficult, though. That's because, as Heinze indicated, he's not doing it conventionally. He's not pulling the puck back on a hooked blade. He's pickle-stabbing it. He's going shish kebab.
Watch again how he fetches it out from all those Devils' feet and sticks:
https://vimeo.com/193211683
That's right. He's using the pointed part of the blade to do the pulling. The very tip!
And running another risk of dating myself, no one did that more famously in franchise history than the Old Two-Niner himself, Phil Bourque, in 1990, when he pinned the puck under his blade on, of all things, a breakaway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkVYLziYR9k
OK, that one didn't wind up so well. In addition to being stuffed by Tim Cheveldae, our man also got slugged by the Red Wings' Gerard Gallant, who felt he was showboating.
"Gallant wanted to kill me," Bourque recalled Saturday night, before offering with a smile. "Who would be that dumb to try it again?"
Ha! Well, Crosby's attempt, obviously, was anything but. As several of his teammates would stress, the brilliance here was that, in the final minute with his team desperate for a goal, he resisted the temptation to just, you know, whack at the thing, as 99.999999 percent of all players would do.
Again referring back to Heinze, he first had to think it.
"I'm just trying to stay patient there," Crosby said. "The puck's in a bunch of feet, and you're just hoping you can eventually get a stick on it, that it's going to jump loose with so many bodies fighting for it. I just waited on it and got a shot away."
I then asked about the tippy-toe-drag:
https://vimeo.com/193209961
Yeah, that play just oozes "lucky."
Look, there was a whole lot to both like and dislike about this game, and I get into some of that in the game analysis. But when there's something truly remarkable transpiring through it all, it's plenty worthwhile to pause and applaud.
That's what Mike Sullivan did.
"I think Sid's probably the best in the league in front of the net," the coach spoke without hesitation, clearly unaware of how far-fetched they might have sounded just a couple years ago. "He can pull the puck through traffic, out of people's feet, between sticks, and still has the poise and the presence of mind to make the right play to score. He has such a great stick. "
Great, the man said, not straight. Though it's equally both these days.
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