Penguins’ Sidney Crosby would be OK with NHL jumping right into playoffs
Easy for him to say, with his team holding a coveted Eastern Conference playoff spot. But Sidney Crosby would be OK if, when the NHL season resumes, the league goes directly into the postseason.
“You try to get in as many games you can,” the Pittsburgh Penguins captain said during a media video call with other NHL players Thursday. “But I wouldn’t mind starting right at the playoffs.”
As Crosby was asked to “play commissioner” by a league-appointed representative, he laughed as he saw the look of New York Rangers defenseman Marc Staal, one of three other prominent Metropolitan Division players on the Zoom call. That is because the Rangers sit on the outside of the Eastern Conference playoff seeding in the standings through March 11, the day before the NHL paused its season as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Definitely not what Sid said,” concluded Staal with a smile.
The NHL must decide on an approach to complete a regular season that, at best, will not resume until at least mid-May and, at worst, might not resume at all.
With so many unknowns at the moment, it is impossible to formulate a fair completion to the regular season and format for awarding the Stanley Cup. Officially, the league said as much.
“We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” Staal said.
But the format when — if — the NHL ramps back up will be a hot topic of conversation. So in the midst of a half-hour call featuring Crosby, Staal, his brother and Carolina Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal and the Philadelphia Flyers’ Claude Giroux, the prominent veterans’ opinions on the issue were of interest.
“I think that there’s a lot of guys in different situations (in regards to their teams’ place in the standings), and the more games you play, the better when it comes to the integrity of everything,” Crosby said from his home north of Pittsburgh. “That’s a big part of it. I just think you get as many games as you can, depending on when or what that looks like.”
Plenty of issues compound the situation. Teams have played differing number of games to this point. Would the league add teams to the playoffs appease those sitting on the bubble? Is it fair, even with a “mini training camp,” to make players go from a long layoff directly into the high-intensity playoffs?
“It’s hard,” said Jordan Staal, who played his first six seasons with the Penguins. “You can speculate and try to decide what’s fair, but there’s always someone who’s going to be (ticked) off about it. But whatever we do decide, let’s just hope it’s for the best of the game.”
“If the season ended today…” is an overused expression in the sports world that has become beyond cliché and is typically an exercise in futility.
It just so happens, though, that hypothetical is relevant now:https://t.co/UaMzoTSDsZ
— Chris Adamski (@C_AdamskiTrib) March 14, 2020
Said Giroux: “You want to give everybody a fair chance. I’d say whatever’s the fairest, I think everybody would kind of accept that.”
Other than the brief foray into their preferred playoff formats, most of the rest of the topics Crosby and the other players discussed dealt with the stay-at-home solitude of the covid-19 situation.
“Like everyone else, just trying to do what’s recommended and stay patient,” Crosby said. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before, so just trying to make the best of it and doing all we need to do to get through it.”
Chris Adamski is a TribLive reporter who has covered primarily the Pittsburgh Steelers since 2014 following two seasons on the Penn State football beat. A Western Pennsylvania native, he joined the Trib in 2012 after spending a decade covering Pittsburgh sports for other outlets. He can be reached at cadamski@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.