The whole truth and nothing but truth

"The meltdown started early with captain Sidney Crosby taking a boarding penalty..."
~ESPN

By Bruce Arthur, National Post, May 12, 2010:

Crosby's Penguins didn't defeat Ovechkin's Capitals in Game 7 last year because Ovechkin was stopped on a breakaway early on; they did not even win because Crosby scored a superlative reaction goal -- a rebound off the end boards that Crosby instantly deflected from skate to stick to net -- to open the scoring.

No, Pittsburgh won that series because the goaltender Washington threw out there, in his 18th career NHL game, turned back into a pumpkin, all ready to be carved.

Pittsburgh went on to win the Cup, Crosby's first. But it was Evgeni Malkin who won the Conn Smythe. Malkin, when fully engaged and on his game, is capable of heights that Crosby and Ovechkin simply cannot match, much less Alexander Semin and Mike Green. Crosby was great; Malkin was better.

Then, the Olympics came. Crosby scored the deciding goal, the golden goal, the goal that will be carved into this country's memory. But aside from that one glorious moment, he had become invisible in that tournament. Crosby was not named to the Olympic all-tournament team; Canadian forward Jonathan Toews was.

Again, though he scored the biggest goal of the whole damned thing - and I'm not minimizing that goal, since it resulted in a personal loss of perhaps 10% of my hearing -- Crosby was not considered the best player on his winning team. And for that matter, if you put Ovechkin on the Canadian Olympic hockey team, do they win? Quite possibly. Put Crosby in with the Russians, and they might not be any better than they were.

[On Olympics]:
The point is that you would rather play on an Olympic team with 23 NHL players and Mike Babcock behind the bench than one that's half KHL players, and has a coach who for a long time didn't seem to realize that he had a backup goaltender. Oh, and that the backup goaltender was better than the other guy.

Ovechkin > Malkin > Crosby

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