ANAHEIM — Sidney Crosby will be known as one of the best half-dozen players in NHL history.
He will also be known for bringing the Pittsburgh Penguins three Stanley Cup titles during his captaincy.
Both of those sentences are likely to be updated.
But hockey economists will dwell on the real history that Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Chris Letang have made. In a league that dictates headwear, they refuse to wear the salary cap.
The Penguins came to Honda Center on Tuesday, and go to Los Angeles Thursday, with a 15-year streak of making the NHL playoffs. Now, they have not actually won a first-round series in three years, and that prompted experts on both sides of the 49th Parallel to predict that the Penguins’ “window” of competitiveness would soon be fogging if not closing. Now it just appears to be stuck.
The Penguins are having another fine season, even with a knee injury to Malkin, who returned to the ice Tuesday and had two goals and an assist in a 4-1 win. They are the No. 1 wild-card team in the Eastern Conference, five points ahead of Boston.
How good is that postseason streak? Nashville and Washington are next, working on eight-year streaks. In the NFL, which also has a salary cap, Kansas City has a seven-year streak and no one else has more than three. The Dodgers lead baseball with nine, Portland leads the NBA with eight.
The Ducks are struggling to keep their late-2021 mojo going. They are 2-4-1 since the holiday pause. Moreover, they are now 6-10-4 against teams that are currently in NHL playoff position, and haven’t beaten one of those since St. Louis on Dec. 12.
“We’ve been kind of all over the place,” winger Jakob Silfverberg said.
They’ve been ensnared by the COVID-19 issue lately but Coach Dallas Eakins was hopeful that they’re past it. He preferred to credit the Penguins, who have won 11 of their last 12 games.
“That’s a good hockey team, and then they get one of the best players in the world back,” Eakins said, referring to Malkin. “We did get better as the game went on but we took a while to get our feet beneath us.”
It was much easier to count on playoff appearances before the NHL slapped a hard cap on its teams going into the 2005-06 season, which was also Crosby’s rookie year. As Ducks fans know too well, Anaheim had the No. 2 pick in the draft and Pittsburgh had No. 1. Newly arrived General Manager Brian Burke asked a scout, “Where’s the dropoff in this draft?” The scout replied, “After No. 1.”
Now Burke is the president of the Penguins, proving that Crosby outlives everything, including misfortune.
Everywhere but Pittsburgh, the cap brings inevitable peaks and valleys. The Chicago Blackhawks and Kings won a total of five Cups last decade, but both have been forced to divest and regroup. The Ducks, who had six consecutive playoff runs of varied lengths, also stepped back.
But Pittsburgh hangs on, even though it has had only two first-round draft choices since 2013. Instead, the Penguins have traded those picks for the likes of Marian Hossa, Phil Kessel, Jarome Iginla, David Perron, Ryan Reaves, Kasperi Kapanen (whom they re-acquired) and Jeff Zucker.
How do they do it? Lots of reasons, but Penguins coach Mike Sulllivan and Ducks coach Dallas Eakins agreed that it had much to do with – wait for it – “culture,” which has become almost as annoying a cliche as “wait for it.”
“When your best player is your hardest-working player, it not only inspires the group,” Eakins said. “It makes everyone else do the same thing. The Penguins have incredible management, too. They have a strong team that could easily knock people off in the playoffs.”
“There’s an expectation that when you put on a Penguins jersey, you’re going to win,” Sullivan said. “This is the best core group of players I’ve been around in terms of leadership. They have built a culture that is second to none.”
The Penguins have won with Marc-Andre Fleury and Matt Murray in goal, and now Tristan Jarry. They have won with Sullivan, Michel Therrien and Dan Bylsma behind the bench. They have won with GMs Ray Shero, Jim Rutherford and now Ron Hextall.
But they also work the draft and the waiver apparatus, and they normally don’t bring up their kids until they’re fully indoctrinated at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, their American Hockey League club.
On this club, Evan Rodrigues was undrafted, put in four years in Buffalo, and suddenly is the Penguins’ second-leading scorer, with 15 goals, seven on the power play. The leader is Jake Guentzel, who was a third-round pick before taking over the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2017.
“E-Rod is the type of player we like,” Sullivan said. “He plays with pace, he has good offensive skills, and he can play at any position up front and also up and down the lineup.”
Bryan Rust was a third-round pick who won two Stanley Cup picks, as did second-round pick Brian Dumoulin. Rust, like Teddy Blueger (a second-round pick) and goalie Jarry spent three years at SWB.
Rust, Rodrigues, Dumoulin, Guentzel, Blueger and Chad Ruhwedel (undrafted) all played college hockey.
Somewhere in there is a formula for team building and managing the money that teams who seek GMs might want to study.
Or the Ducks could check with Crosby, who has played in 174 playoff games, 12 more than they ever have.
