Kevin Dupont

There is no telling what Sidney Crosby has in store for us in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Sid the Kid wrapped up his sophomore season with a NHL-high 120 points, making him the youngest ever to win the Art Ross Trophy.

At the tender age of 19, with a smile that he delivers with the ease and consistency of his feathery passes, Crosby now stands officially as the sport's best new thing.  And if ever a sport needed a new best thing, it's good ol' hockey, forever in search of that certain someone to lead them — you know, someone other than commissioner Gary Bettman's battle up CBA Hill.  

For all the new rule changes the NHL implemented less than two years ago, and for all its attempt to build TV ratings in the U.S., it still hasn't won over the hearts of Americans, the vast majority of whom still prefer a steady diet of football, baseball and Buffalo wings and nachos served up armside to their wide-bodied Barcaloungers.  

Thus far in 2006-'07, the NHL scene to get the most air play in North America's Lower 50 was Chris Simon's crosscheck to Ryan Hollweg's chinny chin chin.  To far too many Americans, that bit of ugliness only reenforced the dated notion that hockey is full of thugs and goons.  No matter that the vast majority of NHL games nowadays go off without so much as an aggravated elbow to the ribs, never mind a roundhouse right to the kisser.  

Simon did something stupid, and fortunately Hollweg was left relatively unscathed, while the game itself was left with what seems to be an ever-reappearing black eye.

Crosby, though, is anything but a goon. In fact, the crafty Canadian is everything the New NHL wants. He is fast. He is skilled. On many nights, he carries his fellow Penguins on his back and pulls fans in the aged Igloo out of their seats with his speed, savviness and sleight-of-hand playmaking. He has game galore.

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Sure, there have been faster (Pavel Bure, for one). There have been slicker (Mike Modano and Vincent Lecavalier come to mind).  And in terms of raw strength and power,  there is an argument to be made that  Washington winger Alex Ovechkin has a little more sizzle to his game. But in terms of style and grace and production, the man of the moment is the wide-grinned kid from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, whom the Penguins made the No. 1 pick in the 2005 entry draft.

"A guy like Sidney, you know he knows how to handle [the playoffs]," Lecavalier opined during a conference call in the days leading up to this year's playoffs. "He's had pressure for two years — even more than two years, his whole career.  And he's handled it pretty well."

Special feature Schedule, stats, player breakdowns, pick

It was Art Williams, the former owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who dubbed Lecavalier the "next Michael Jordan"  in the hours that led to the Bolts picking the strapping 6-foot-4 pivot first overall in the 1998 draft.  The fast-talking, and ill-advised, Williams was long gone before Lecavalier's game blossomed.  Lecavalier didn't average even 50 points over his first four seasons, in part why he and the Bolts didn't even make it to the playoffs until after he completed his fifth regular season.  When the Bolts won the Cup in 2004, he had six full NHL seasons under his belt, with a single-season best of only 78 points.  

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Wayne Gretzky, the game's all-time scoring great, was an NHL rookie with Edmonton in 1979-80, and the Great One (known simply as The Kid in those days) led the league in scoring with 137 points.  The Oilers made it to the playoffs that season, only to bow out in three games, and it wasn't until his fifth season that Gretzky won his first of four Stanley Cups with those legendary Edmonton squads.

Mario Lemieux made his NHL debut with the Penguins in 1984-'85, and despite his immediate prominence as a prolific scorer (100 points or more in each of his first six seasons), he didn't lead the Pens into the playoffs until his fifth season.  The two Cups won by the Penguins, in 1991 and 1992, were Mario Magnifique's seventh and eighth seasons in the NHL.

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If history serves as any baramoter, then the odds aren't in favor of Crosby capturing the spotlight and running off with the show in his first postseason run.  A Cup win by the Penguins would guarantee that, but the experiences of Mssrs. Lemieux, Gretzky and Lecavalier underscore the degree of difficulty inherent in that mission.  On average, they needed six NHL seasons to get it done.  

It may be the New NHL, with speed the underlying theme, but the best things in the game still take some time.  Asking Crosby to deliver all the goods here in his second NHL season, and his first postseason, simply is asking way too much.

Heck, he needed almost two seasons to save hockey in Pittsburgh — plans for a new arena finalized just weeks ago. Give him a couple of more years to save the sport at large, OK?

Don't be surprised, in fact, if Crosby's first few playoff games show some rough edges, at least at the outset.  Again, it took Lecavalier 386 regular-season games to get to his first taste of  playoff hockey, and all the expectations surrounding the moment initially overwhelmed him.

"I remember my first couple of shifts," he said. "I was just running around with my head cut off, I was just so excited."

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