TORONTO -- Sidney Crosby clearly wanted no part of the discussion or debate.
Right up until he had a chance to cast his own vote the best way he knows how.
With Canada's largest city still being the media epicenter of hockey, it's also where local hype/hysteria can easily creep its way into the collective consciousness of the hockey world as a whole. And now that the Maple Leafs are off to an encouraging, exciting start, and that it's been fueled by an encouraging, exciting young player, the latest theme to have suddenly sprouted from here is whether or not Auston Matthews, that young player, ranks among or even atop the game's elite.
The theme's now being copied and pasted, in essence, in articles, podcasts and other broadcast elements across the True North and, it even wound up with an article on NHL.com, the league's official organ that has its own heavy Toronto influence.
Well, the real answer, I dare say, was delivered in three ways before, during and after the Penguins' 3-0 shutout of the Maple Leafs on this Thursday night at Scotiabank Arena:
1. At the morning skate, when a Toronto reporter asked Mike Babcock if the local media is being too quick to paint Crosby as “passing the torch” to a younger generation -- as if journalistic tenor should somehow be Babcock's concern -- the Maple Leafs' coach came back with this beauty: “Here’s what I think: One guy’s got two OIympic gold medals and three Stanley Cups.”
Babcock was Crosby’s coach, by the way, for both Olympic golds.
2. Crosby would thoroughly outplay Matthews, including a 7-0 dominance in team shots when his line and Matthews' line shared the ice. More on that in a bit.
3. Crosby came through not with goals -- he's still without one of those through six games -- but by living out another of Babcock's memorable quotes about him, the one where the coach called him a "serial winner" while at the Sochi Olympics.
In the few days leading up to this game, Crosby and Mike Sullivan had been working together, even sharing time in his office, going over video for what he could do better but also what the team could do better. Not coincidentally, those wound up being much the same: Crosby needed to hold the puck more, wear down his opponents and work lower in the attacking zone. So did everyone else.
This, then, is what the serial winner did in the first period Thursday night:
Follow nothing but No. 87 up there the whole way to take a free tour of the Toronto zone. That's a living legend listening to his coach.
"We wanted to hold onto the puck a little bit more," Crosby said. "It's a lot more fun playing that way, and I think you can wear teams down playing that way, too. That plays to our strengths. Our focus was defending by playing in the offensive zone."
Defense and smart play sounds dull, but he did it with flash:
That's midway through the second period. And that Toronto player undressed by that sickening skate swivel was Jake Gardiner, who promptly retreated after being defeated.
"Just a skate turn," Crosby told me with a shrug, though he tellingly recalled exactly which sequence I was citing.
This one's even filthier:
This is now midway through the third. Still a one-goal game. And it's just a playground to this individual.
He sees Toronto's Mitch Marner coming his way for more than 40 feet. He waits. He waits some more. And somehow, something clicks inside that helmet that, if he only waits out Marner, he can backhand a pass off the boards to himself and explode the other way, the Penguins could have a three-on-two break.
Watch it again. And again.
I asked Crosby if he'd ever tried that one in a game.
"Hm. Not sure."
How about a practice?
"Probably."
Good Lord.
Here's one more, and it's not nearly as wild, but it also resulted in the game's most meaningful moment:
That's the beginning of a power play in the first period. Crosby's lined up at the right dot against Par Lindholm, a 56.8 percent faceoff ace who'd take five of his seven draws on this night. But not this one, as Crosby cleaned him with a forehand chip back to Kris Letang at the right point. Then, when Letang jumps up to nudge the puck forward to Evgeni Malkin for the goal, Crosby alertly scoots back to cover Letang's vacated point.
Watch Lindholm's body language. Dude's seen a ghost. No idea what just hit him.
The best player in the world just hit him.
And maybe, deep down, the best player in the world wanted everyone to remember that's still the case. The best way he knew how. By doing whatever it took to win.
• Crosby was on the ice for 22 chances in the Penguins' favor and 11 against, 10 shots in the Penguins' favor and four against, despite usually sharing the ice -- at Babcock's preference -- with Matthews and John Tavares.
• Annoying thing No. 1,967 about the Toronto hockey culture: Everything is about the Maple Leafs. And that goes for the media, too, and all their questions being somehow Toronto-centric.
After this game, for example, Sullivan was asked how this experience of losing might affect "the team down the hall." Because, you know, that'd be what would keep him up at night later.
I offer this only because it was impressive how genuinely little the Penguins bought into any of it, on or off the ice.
Listen to Crosby when I asked if this game was more about his team's own need to improve or going against the Maple Leafs:
Malkin's response to a similar question was that much better.
"I'm not thinking about the Leafs," he said. "This was our game. We played great. We played smart. We played right."
• Wait, was Patric Hornqvist demoted or promoted?
Just a few shifts into the game, Sullivan switched two right wingers, Hornqvist and Daniel Sprong, from their respective lines. Hornqvist thus joined Matt Cullen and Riley Sheahan, while Sprong went to the third line and, ultimately, to the bench as the game dragged deeper with the same one-goal lead.
Funny thing happened: Cullen, Sheahan and Hornqvist were outstanding, cycling deep into the Toronto zone better than anyone on the Penguins. By the third period, Sullivan was double-shifting them.
"Man," Cullen would beam, "that was fun."
• Almost as if inspired by that new line -- fourth, third, whatever it is -- the Malkin line wound up matching their effectiveness in the third. Not just Malkin, either. Phil Kessel gave his most complete effort of the young season, and Carl Hagelin was just as sharp.
• The Penguins had been outshot, 54-33, in the first periods of their first five games. The other night against the Canucks, they could have been deemed clinically comatose over the first 11 minutes. It's been their most maddening problem by a mile, if only because it would figure to be so easily fixed.
This was only one game, but it was fixed for one game: The Penguins outshot the Maple Leafs, 17-9, in the first period and controlled possession all over the rink, notably in the neutral zone, which Sullivan allowed afterward had been a point of emphasis the two preceding days in video lessons.
"I thought our guys made good decisions on when we had opportunities to pressure pucks and chase pucks and when we didn't," Sullivan said. "We worked collectively, as a group of five, to try to get the puck back."
To put that in plainer language: The Penguins did a lot more skating backward -- it's not trapping, but it's in the vicinity -- once the Maple Leafs had established clear possession in their end. That's always part of Sullivan's system but, by stressing it, he planted in the players' heads not to over-pursue.
In this case, by moving fluidly between the blue lines right from the opening draw, the visitors held the puck enough to steal any early momentum that might have belonged to the home team.
• The Leafs haven't won the Cup since 1967, the year before the NHL doubled in size from six to 12 teams -- including Pittsburgh. They haven't even made the Final in these 50 years.
This current group's got some fun talent up front, particularly Matthews. But that defense corps, with Ron Hainsey on the top pairing, and that goaltender, Frederik Andersen, are countless kilometers shy of Cup-contending status. Major moves would still need to be made, almost all of them aimed at the back end. And even then, they'd have to develop and adhere to a more traditional Babcock style -- using all five guys in a swarm -- and that'd have to happen in a hurry.
Put a hold on that parade down Yonge Street.
• I wrote after the morning skate that maybe this would be the right opponent at the right time, ridiculous as that might have sounded before faceoff.
"I honestly think it was. I think it made a difference," Jack Johnson told me. "We had a lot of things we needed to sharpen up and we did."
This was Johnson's best game with the Penguins, by the way, and there isn't a close second.
• Who was better in this game: Letang or Brian Dumoulin?
There's a chicken-and-egg here, naturally, since they're partners, but both were at their best. Maybe this could be the tiebreaker: The only two Penguins who weren't on the ice for a single Toronto high-danger scoring chance were Dumoulin ... and Crosby.
• It was great to see Matt Murray back to health, never mind in such form, but it'll be greater when this wave of goaltending concussions, coincidental or not, gets reversed.
According to a study released yesterday by Canada's TSN television network, there were 15 concussions at the position last season, 10 of which were the result of shots off the mask, five of which occurred in practice. Already this season, there have been two more between Murray getting one in practice and another to the Canucks' Thatcher Demko. The 15 concussions last season resulted in 189 man-games lost by goaltenders, this after none of the previous three seasons saw more than 53 man-games lost.
Murray is adamant his mask is safe, but it's sure worth a deeper, league-wide look.
• Everywhere you walk in the immediate vicinity of the Leafs' arena, the hockey shops are cluttered with merchandise related to the hottest players in the business, including legends from the past. And everywhere I looked on this day -- and really, going back forever -- those legends from the past were represented primarily with the same three names: Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Gordie Howe.
With barely a No. 66 in sight.
If anyone ever wonders why Mario Lemieux, the most gifted performer in the sport's history, has never gotten his due in his home country, never forget that it's always started right here. Toronto and the whole of English-speaking Canada already had their heroes, and no one was about to change that, let alone someone from Quebec.
I've been invited to write a column for The Hockey News on this subject, and I'll link to it here when it's published. Just wanted to share that much now. Really bugs me.
• I need to come home. But first, there's a practice here today at 1 p.m. Matt Sunday and I will cover.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins at Maple Leafs, Toronto, Oct. 18, 2018 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS
