Leaving the continent for a week is always a discombobulating experience. Going from two fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in the sports world to having no contact with the news and events back home leaves me feeling out of the loop when I return.
Case in point: Sidney Crosby is currently terrorizing the National Hockey League and causing goaltenders to wet their beds as they have nightmares of facing the baby-faced assassin.
(Although, I guess he can’t really be considered baby-faced anymore as long as he keeps allowing that anemic growth of pubic hair to continue to sprout on his visage. Sid, either go clean-shaven or wait for the other ball to drop before you start trying to grow a beard).
When I left on the cruise, the hockey beat writers were all a twitter over Crosby’s seventeen game point streak, primarily because he was leading the Penguins through a tremendous stretch of hockey in which they won a plethora of games in a row.
I assumed some team would be able to stop the Crosby Express and hold him pointless at some point while I was sipping pina coladas and rubbing tanning oil all over my body.
I was wrong.
Sid the Kid only turned up the heat whilst I was gone. He has eight points in his last five games and scored a goal last night against the Florida Pathers in another Pittsburgh win. Crosby’s point streak is now at 23 games and he continues to pull away from the pack in the NHL scoring race.
If the first six weeks of the season belonged to Steven Stamkos (who is quickly becoming a distant second in the Art Ross hunt), then the past six weeks have belonged to the man who scored, arguably, the biggest goal in Canada’s hockey history (I still get chills when I see his overtime heroics from Vancouver).
It seems almost comical now that media personalities were willing to place Stamkos on the same orbit as Sid the Kid. Yes, Stamkos is a great player, but Crosby is the only one breathing the rarefied air of Gretzky and Lemieux.
Also, can we finally put the Ovechkin versus Crosby argument to rest? Crosby is the better player. Case closed. Ovechkin has flashes of unparalleled brilliance but Sidney is much more consistent and polished.
Sidney does something for me that no other hockey player has been able to do since the lockout of 2004 (Yikes, reading that sentence back makes me question my heterosexuality, but I promise that my reasoning is a lot less gayer than it sounds).
Crosby is the lone guy who can actually make me care about hockey. Whenever he is on a national network, I consider it appointment viewing. He does things with the puck that no one else in the game is capable of. And he makes it look so easy that a casual viewer—one who has never laced up the blades—wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at the majority of what he does on the ice.
And that’s too bad because, as a former less than an adequate hockey player, I can guarantee that Crosby does at least five things a game that his teammates wouldn’t dare try in practice, let alone during a game, lest they risk embarrassment in front of thousands of people.
The scary part is that Crosby’s only 23 years old. What does he have in store for his prime?
I can’t wait to find out.
Merry Christmas from Talkin' with Tewks!!!!
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