OK, So Maybe We Haven't Seen the Last of Peak Sidney Crosby

It was a little more than a year ago when a prominent web site published a column by a writer saying it was clearly time to accept that Sidney Crosby's powers had been diminished. Crosby is still a great player, that writer pontificated, but we must now concede that he is only a point-per-game type.

A 40-goal-scorer? Someone who could approach 100 points again? Not with Crosby nearing 30. Not with his injury history. Not with interference, clutching, and grabbing back in full force. It was time to embrace the new, 82-ish-point Crosby for the rest of his career.

What an idiot, huh? What moron wrote that piece anyway?

It was me!

OK, but in my defense, I did write that it was time to say goodbye to "peak Crosby," and as great as his 2016-17 campaign has been, his 1.23 points per game this season is just the tenth-best mark of his career. It's also his highest points per game average since 2013-14, so you can see where I was coming from when I decided to write off Crosby, one of the five best players in NHL history, when he was 28 years old.

You know what? I hear it now. It was wrong. I'm an idiot.

So how did we get this 40-goal Crosby back? How did he become a 100-point guy (if he played 82 games) again?

It's smart to ask the guy who left Crosby for mostly dead on the side of the road on December 2015, so I'll answer those questions.

It's not a coincidence that the Crosbyaissance™ has coincided with Mike Sullivan taking over as head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins last season. With Sullivan behind the bench, Crosby has 71 goals and 150 points in 119 games, an average of 1.26 points per game, which mirrors what he has done this season. When Sullivan arrived and sounded like a John Tortorella clone in his first interviews, it was hard to imagine he'd be the guy to help make Crosby as potent as he's been in years, yet here we are.

Sullivan's predecessor was Mike Johnston, and during his season and a half at the helm, Crosby had 34 goals and 103 points in 104 games (so you can see where my point-per-game theory was born). While some of us were blaming this on lingering health issues, it looks more like Johnston was kryptonite around Superman's neck.

It's important to really appreciate what Johnston did: he held the best player of his generation to less than a point per game for more than a season's worth of games. During the two seasons Johnston was coach, Crosby averaged 1.09 points per game in 2014-15 and 1.06 points per game in 2015-16; he has never been worse than 1.23 points per game in any other season. Sullivan could remove a blade from Crosby's skate every other game and Crosby still wouldn't dip below a point per game.

If Sullivan gets a bulk of the credit, who gets the rest? Probably Phil Kessel, right? That highly paid superstar goal scorer acquired before last season to give Crosby the rare elite winger who can fill the net and draw attention from … what's that? Crosby and Kessel have played 58 minutes at five-on-five this season? That's it? Then who?

Conor Sheary!

Crosby and Sheary, an undrafted free agent out of UMass, became a thing toward the end of last season (maybe Sullivan is a wizard?) and they've been on a line regularly in 2016-17. And it's not like Crosby is lugging Sheary around the ice—their possession numbers when together and apart are very close.

Now that I've delved into this matter, do I really have to own my poor call on Crosby? Outside of Sullivan, did anyone think that Sheary could help infuse life into Crosby? How can I be expected to guess that? This would be like trying to predict that the 2016-17 Columbus Blue Jackets would be vying for a Presidents' Trophy with Tortorella behind the bench and Nick Foligno getting to 30 goals again.

And yet, this is still Crosby's third-worst season in terms of points per game. So what are we really talking about here? Since he missed a few games this season with an injury, Crosby should fall short of 100 points, a plateau he's reached once since 2010-11. Is this really all that impressive?

Yes!

This goes back to my admittedly somewhat spicy take that Crosby's 1,000 career points are more impressive than anyone else's, but at least my logic is consistent. Crosby got to 1,000 points in an era that was nothing like the era of Wayne Gretzky, when teams were scoring goals at the same rate Gary Bettman doles out excuses for why the NHL shouldn't go to the Olympics.

It's the same thing for Crosby's current season: he's averaging 1.23 points per game with scoring down about 0.25 goals per game since his rookie season in 2005-06. What Crosby is doing now isn't close to his 2010-11 campaign (1.61 points per game), which was cut short by a concussion, or his 2013 season (1.56), which was shortened by a lockout, or even his 2006-07 season (1.52), which ended with the Hart Trophy.

But it's still proof that Crosby is back to his old self, or at least as close as he's been to it in years.

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