2011-12 winner Max Pacioretty demonstrates how to be awesome
The Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy is voted on annually by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association and awarded to the NHL player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to hockey. The writers have their work cut out for them this year, since all three finalists are unquestionably worthy of the award.
Crosby’s beautiful smile just got a little less beautiful.
There’s something particularly horrifying about dental injuries. Maybe it’s the thought of what your own mouth would look like minus a few teeth, or the sheer in-your-face nature of the injuries. You can’t see a torn ACL, but you can see a pool of blood littered with teeth. Sidney Crosby, a habitual mouthguard-wearer and owner of a (formerly) beautiful smile horrified a nation Saturday when he took a puck in the mouth at the expense of several teeth and his jaw. This week we’ll have a quick refresher on how jaw injuries are treated, and explore the options for hockey teeth.
Breaking news out of Pittsburgh today, as the team announced that captain Sidney Crosby will be out indefinitely with a broken jaw. Crosby was hit in the face by a puck in the first period of the game Saturday against the New York Islanders.
If you watched Sidney Crosby play against the Toronto Maple Leafs Saturday night, or were fortunate enough to see him play in person, you most likely walked out of the building talking nothing but how good Sidney Crosby really is.
In the mind of “The Great One”, Wayne Gretzky, who watched Crosby play in Toronto, he told ESPN’s Pierre LeBrun he’s the best all-around player in the game today.
In reading about Gary Bettman, it’s clear that many of the things the NHL has demanded from its Players’ Association are lifted from work previously done with the National Basketball Association.
Forgotten is in how much trouble the NBA was when Bettman was hired by that league in 1981. The league had expanded to 23 teams, but arenas were half-full and the games were only televised late at night on tape-delay.
It’s almost a parallel to the NHL in the mid-2000s. The league switched over to a soft salary cap tied to league revenue, the first of its kind, and a modest new TV deal along with the arrival of a star player helped grow the game to fantastic heights.
Michael Jordan and Sidney Crosby are different people who appeal to different audiences and had different modicums of success upon entreating the league. Crosby was a phenom since his early teenage years, Jordan wasn’t even the No. 1 overall pick. His rookie success got him a Sports Illustrated cover and a major draw in opposing rinks.
Crosby only visit 19 road rinks in his rookie season; The second biggest failing of the NHL coming out of the last lockout was the emphasis on divisional regular season games that prevented star players from playing in every arena. He couldn’t be marketed the same way as Jordan, even though hockey is a lot like basketball in the way its season is structured. What remains though, is that him and a select few other NHLers generate a buzz when they’re in town. As such, they ought to be scheduled to play in every single rink.
And so it was that Evgeni Malkin’s pronouncement earlier this summer that Sidney Crosby would consider playing overseas if there is a lockout was proven to be prophecy, confirmed by the NHL’s golden boy himself.
Why? He’s finally feeling healthy (“It’s been really good,” he told Dave Molinari of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Nothing. I’ve been feeling 100 percent. It feels good to not have to think about that, and to work as hard as you want. It’s been really good.”), and, due to all that time he missed with a goofy brain in the last two seasons — 101 of 164 possible games — he apparently feels it might be best to not just sit around collecting escrow checks and waiting for the owners to remove the chains and padlocks from its teams’ rinks. And apparently, he looked very good indeed in working out with his teammates ahead of a trip to New York. Read the rest of this entry »
If an upper spending limit were no object, how much money could Sidney Crosby possibly make in a true free market system?
In the summer of 2002, Bill Guerin signed a 5-year contract worth $40M. Guerin at the time was a 32-year old forward who had managed 41 goals with the Boston Bruins the previous year. Still, a $9M contract to a player on the wrong side of 30 is ludicrous now ten years later.
Bobby Holik, going into his 32-year old year, is coming off a 25-goal campaign in New Jersey. His stature as a star player in New Jersey during their recent Stanley Cup runs makes him worth far more on the open market. He signs a 5-year deal worth $45M with the New York Rangers.
The free agent market exploded in the early part of the 2000s. The system still wasn’t a true free market system. Players were under team control until they were 31 years of age. Once they hit that age, removed from their primes, they cashed in.
Earlier this summer, Sidney Crosby signed his lifetime guarantee contract in Pittsburgh. He’s under contract for $8.7M of a cap hit until the summer of 2025, when he’ll be 43 38 (doh) years old. Only the Penguins could negotiate with him. But why are the most sought-after players signing in 2012 for the same prices they did ten years ago?
Jo Innes, Ryan Lambert, Daniel Wagner, Cam Charron, Ellen Etchingham, Jake Goldsbie, Darren Kritzer
