Sidney Crosby has two Stanley Cups, two Olympic gold medals, a world junior championship, a world championship and a World Cup, so another trip to the Stanley Cup finals would normally be par for the course for the Pittsburgh Penguins' superstar. But if the Penguins are able to finish off the Ottawa Senators and advance, this trip to the Cup finals might be the most impressive accomplishment of Crosby's career. Never before has the league's best player been
Midway through the regular season, it appeared that Pittsburgh was on course to enter the postseason as the strongest team in the league, but in late February, the Penguins lost No. 1 defenseman Kris Letang to season-ending neck surgery.
Although Crosby has raised the play of nearly everyone he has ever stepped on the ice with, Letang was one of the few players who actually made Sid better.
When Crosby and Letang were on the ice at the same time this season, the Penguins scored 3.67 goals per 60 minutes at even strength and controlled the shot counter with a 55.8 Corsi for percentage (CF%). Without Letang, Crosby's on-ice production was still elite but dropped to 3.19 goals per 60 and a 53.1 CF%.
Letang has been making his teammates better for a decade. On average, the Penguins' CF% has improved by 3.5 percent over his 596-game regular-season career. Crosby's on-ice goals for since 2007-08 increased by 11.3 percent when he played with Letang.
Losing a top defenseman is usually a kiss of death in the postseason. It normally takes a Norris Trophy-caliber blueliner such as Letang, Drew Doughty, Duncan Keith, Zdeno Chara or Nicklas Lidstrom to anchor a Cup team.
In fact, Crosby has never raised any type of trophy without an elite defenseman by his side. Even going back to the world juniors in 2005, Sid had Shea Weber, Brent Seabrook and Dion Phaneuf on his team.
But Crosby is still the league's best player (though Connor McDavid is in his rear-view mirror), so even with Letang missing, the Penguins would have been expected to make a deep run. They entered the postseason sporting a deep and skilled blue line, highlighted by Justin Schultz, who notched 51 points in 78 games this season, plus they made depth additions at the trade deadline by acquiring Ron Hainsey and Mark Streit.
But injuries have piled up far beyond what anyone would have dreamed. At different points during the playoffs, Pittsburgh has been without Schultz, Patric Hornqvist, Conor Sheary, Bryan Rust, Carl Hagelin and Trevor Daley. Starting goalie Matt Murray went down right before the postseason, which forced Marc-Andre Fleury back between the pipes after he served as the backup in last year's Cup run. Even Crosby missed one game due to a concussion.
The Penguins have had to reach into their system to find bodies. In Pittsburgh's 7-0 win over the Senators in Game 5, Josh Archibald (10 career NHL games) and Carter Rowney (27 career games) were pressed into action.
Although his club is still deep and talented, Crosby has never had more pressure to put the team on his back. In Game 5, he came up big with a goal and an assist.
The Penguins didn't get any favors from the playoff bracket, either. Although the Senators had the second-worst record of any playoff team in the East, Pittsburgh was forced to beat the Columbus Blue Jackets in Round 1 -- a team that had a better goal differential than the Penguins during the regular season -- and then Washington, the No. 1-ranked team in the standings and in 5-on-5 goals for percentage.
Somehow, Crosby has produced at a higher scoring rate than he did last season en route to winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs' most valuable player. In 15 playoff games, he has 17 points, which trails that of only teammate Evgeni Malkin and Anaheim Ducks star Ryan Getzlaf.
His overall even-strength numbers were driven down by the seven-game series against the Capitals, in which Pittsburgh as a team gave up 142 more shot attempts than it took. But Crosby finished the series with a plus-2.0 percent relative Corsi and plus-2-goal on-ice differential. Against the Senators, he has been dominant as ever, with a terrific 56.3 CF%.
Not only is Crosby doing this without his favorite defensemen, but he has also had a gaggle of different linemates. Young winger Jake Guentzel, who began the year in the AHL, has spent 187 minutes alongside the future Hall of Fame center, but the next-highest minute count goes to Sheary, with 95 minutes, then Hornqvist, with 48 minutes, and Rust, with 43.
Given that head coach Mike Sullivan can play Crosby with just about anyone, he can stick Malkin and Phil Kessel together and never break them up. The Malkin-Kessel pair has played 179 minutes and managed a 53.8 CF% while outscoring opponents 10-5 in the postseason.
Sullivan can also give Malkin and Kessel favorable matchups. In Game 5, Crosby spent 11:28 minutes sharing the ice with Senators' superstar defenseman Erik Karlsson, who has made a strong case this season for being the best defenseman in the NHL. In the same game, Malkin was asked to play against Karlsson for only 4:07.
As one scout told ESPN's Craig Custance, playing against Karlsson for the vast majority of his ice time has forced Crosby to focus on his defensive play as much as his offense.
"When you have a guy like Karlsson jumping into the play, and the havoc it creates when they have scoring chances, it creates offensive-zone time," the scout said. "When Karlsson is playing against top guys like Crosby, that means Sid has to come back and stop and play defense half a shift."
You wouldn't call this year's playoffs a masterpiece by Crosby, except maybe on the power play, where he has been on the ice for 10 goals in just 47 minutes. It has mostly been the type of grinding effort you might attribute to a nasty forward such as Ryan Kesler -- not the NHL's No. 1 goal scorer during the regular season.
But that's what makes Crosby such a special, generational talent: He can overcome just about any circumstance. Never before has he proven it as much as he has this season.