Not that I, or anyone else, was necessarily expecting anything other than the excellence he's displayed for his entire career, but it's been quite a treat to watch 35-year-old Sidney Crosby keep chugging along, just as he always has.
Entering the league as an 18-year-old with monumental expectations, Crosby has lived up to every bit of the hype and then some. And he just keeps doing it, even as he enters the later stages of his career.
Crosby, who hasn't missed any of the Penguins' 44 games this season, has 21 goals and 31 assists. His average of 1.18 points per game has him on track for 96 points over a full season. For a player 35 or older, that's a feat accomplished only five times since the 1990s, and only twice since 2000. Each of those players to do so are now immortalized on Yonge Street in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, where Crosby will eventually join them.
What's been most impressive about Crosby's season is that a big chunk of his 52 points have come during 5-on-5 action. Scoring 5-on-5 goals at his most efficient rate since the 2010-11 season, Crosby is tied for seventh in the league with 17. Factoring in assists, he's putting up 5-on-5 points at his second-highest rate since the 2012-13 season and sits tied for third in the NHL with 32.
And just for good measure, his impact toward the Penguins' ability to create quality offense at even-strength remains among the best forwards in the league, while his finishing impact has skyrocketed to elite company this season. Here's a snapshot of each of his past three seasons, courtesy of JFresh Hockey. (You can read a full explainer on the chart here.)
JFRESH HOCKEY
Bearing all of that in mind, anyone who has watched the Penguins all season would tell you there have been a couple patches of Crosby's play in which he didn't quite have the same mojo as say, the three-game stretch in November when he put up 10 points. Sometimes it's been punting on prime opportunities to shoot, looking for that next play. Other times it's been forcing passes through lanes that simply weren't there and, in some cases, sparking counterattacks for the opposition.
Those patches are still better than the vast majority of NHL skaters could hope for, but they've been a bit unusual for the standard he's set for himself. Again, this hasn't really impacted his overall impact for the course of the season, it's just a bit more glaring due to the inconsistent and mediocre impact from the Penguins' bottom six. When he hasn't been at his best, the Penguins haven't found the win column very often.
Even Wednesday night in Ottawa, Crosby most definitely didn't have his best, yet he still managed to record three assists, factoring in on all but one of the Penguins' goals. They lost in overtime despite that. Not a single bottom-six forward recorded a point -- an all-too-familiar tale of the season.
In a very rudimentary way of quantifying Crosby's consistency this season compared to past seasons, I went through and found the percentage of regular-season games in which he recorded a point for every season of his career. Points obviously aren't a perfect way of capturing what I'm after here, but with on-ice metrics being too susceptible to variance from game to game, there aren't many other options without getting extremely granular, to which point I'd probably be overanalyzing it anyway.
My hockey-stats-for-dummies analysis (me being the dummy, of course) shows that Crosby is currently being held without a point more frequently than every season of his career with the exception of Mike Johnston's one full season as head coach in 2014-15, and the 2019-20 season when he played through discomfort before missing a large chunk of time due to core muscle surgery.
He has a point in 63.6% of the Penguins' games (28 of 44) so far this season:
I can't move on without once again mentioning just how much the Johnston era sticks out like a sore thumb here.
OK, so what's to be made of this season? I think it's a combination of a few things:
1. The man is 35, after all. Fully recognizing that he's still been great in the grand scheme of things this season, no one can stave off Father Time forever. He still comes off as hungry as ever to get back to glory, but can anyone really blame him for not being a world-beater each and every night during the dog days of the schedule? With 1,152 regular-season games and another 180 postseason games under his belt in 18 seasons, I have a tough time being critical when he doesn't get on the scoresheet in a late-December game against the Red Wings.
2. The added burden of picking up the forward depth's slack has worn him down a tad. It's human nature to grip the stick a little tighter and overthink it a bit when you've got a heavier load on your shoulders. That might partially explain some of the uncharacteristic processing errors we've seen from Crosby in recent weeks.
3. What might be the biggest contributing factor is that Crosby is pacing for just 22 power-play points over a full season. That checks in as the lowest 82-game pace of his career.
Crosby's impact toward creating quality power-play chances isn't quite as strong now as it was just a season ago, but the discrepancy doesn't quite explain away the considerable drop-off in power-play points, so what gives?
The Penguins' power-play has been downright dysfunctional at times this season, and although they have done a better job of creating high-danger looks than many are giving them credit for, it just hasn't been to the level they're capable of. And within not doing so at the level they're capable of, they have not done a great job of converting the looks they are getting.
Here are the four forwards Crosby has shared the ice with the most on the power play this season, followed by the number of expected goals they've generated compared to actual goals scored on the power play, per Evolving-Hockey.
Evgeni Malkin
Expected power-play goals: 7
Power-play Goals: 6
Jake Guentzel
Expected power-play goals: 6.4
Power-play Goals: 5
Rickard Rakell
Expected power-play goals: 6.3
Power-play Goals: 7
Bryan Rust
Expected power-play goals: 3.9
Power-play Goals: 2
Aside from Rakell, each of those forwards are scoring below expectations on the power play -- 4.3 goals below expected, to be exact. You have to figure Crosby would have nabbed a point on one or two of those, if not all of them. And then considering that each of those players (with the exception of Rust since the start of last season) are typically plus-finishers (players who consistently outshoot expectations), it starts to become pretty clear why Crosby's power-play production has dipped.
Crosby himself, who as I mentioned is enjoying a resurgent finishing impact at 5-on-5, is scoring below expectations on the power play. He's generated 4.82 expected goals, but has scored only three times. It's not what anyone wants to hear, but I have a tough time believing all of it won't correct itself -- at least somewhat -- by the end of the season.
So, while Crosby hasn't been as consistent getting on the scoresheet this season, it looks slightly worse than it really is. The reality here is that the Penguins should have positioned themselves to capitalize on Crosby remaining this dominant this late into his career by supplying him with adequate depth, but instead, they continue to ask the world of him and falter on the nights he can't provide it.
