The Kid: A Season with Sidney Crosby and the New NHL

For my parents

Contents

Foreword by Roy MacGregor

Acknowledgments

1. The Arrival

2. The Crosby Show

3. Born To Play Hockey

4. Under A Penguin’s Wing

5. Rough Start

6. A Dream Come True

7. The Flyers

8. The Other Rookie

9. Grey December

10. Heart Break

11. A Fresh Start

12. The Olympics

13. Backlash

14 .Oh Canada

15. Groaning Pains

16. New Year’s Leave

17. Au Revoir, Le Magnifique

18. Lessons in Losing

19. The Kids Are All Right

20. Chasing 100

21. Following Sidney Crosby

Epilogue

What a Difference a Year Makes

Appendix I. The Pittsburgh Penguins 2005-2006

Appendix II. Sidney Crosby’s Season Game-by-Game Results and Highlights

Photo Gallery

Foreword by Roy MacGregor

In the summer of 2005, I had a singularly brilliant idea. I immediately dispatched it, by e-mail, to Ed Greenspon, the editor of the Globe and Mail and my boss. How could he resist? I would, I selflessly offered, be willing to bail from my regular column – writing about such profound, and perhaps even related, topics as puppy training and parliamentary behaviour – and return, briefly, to my first love: covering hockey.

Why not? The 2005-2006 National Hockey League season was certain to be the most interesting in decades, perhaps the most significant since the league’s beginning back in 1917. The bitter labour dispute that had turned professional hockey into the first major sport to lose an entire season was finally over. The long lockout had, to many of us, been the best possible solution to a game that had, in recent years, become almost unbearable to watch. It had forced the owners – seeking economic certainty through a salary cap – to think, finally, about the product they would offer to entice increasingly disenchanted fans back to the game. It was far more than just getting the books in order; it was about, finally, getting the game in order.

That summer, the storylines were already bursting like a lawn sprinkler. The small-market teams – declared doomed only a few seasons earlier – were now likely to survive, perhaps even thrive. The new rules proposed looked like they had the potential to open the game up again and to reward speed and skill over obstruction and interference.

And there were now two years of fresh faces and new talents to meet – those young players who had been denied the 2004-2005 season and the new top draft picks of this year, chief among them a then seventeen-year-old from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, by the name of Sidney Crosby.

I fired my e-mail off and soon realized I was probably but one of dozens of political and city and arts and business writers offering to sacrifice a year of routine boredom for a year of the exciting unknown.

Ed took little time in responding. Stay where you are, he said. Keep doing what you’re doing. We have something else in mind.

That something else turned out to be a far more original idea than even I had imagined. It was, in many ways, the precise reverse of what I had suggested.

The Globe’s Atlantic bureau chief, Shawna Richer, had proposed that she view the coming nhl season through the eyes and experience of that teenager who had been virtually an afterthought in my pitch. She would write about this pivotal year in hockey by using Sidney Crosby as the starting point rather than the finishing. He would be the way in which to look at the new rules and how they affected a playmaking genius with considerable speed and not a great deal of size. He would be the manner in which she could study the new collective bargaining agreement’s effect on small-market teams, particularly one that was flirting with bankruptcy, which was precisely the case of the new team Crosby was off to join. He would be Canada’s next great hope in the national game, the heir to Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau and Bobby Orr and Guy Lafleur and Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. To make the storyline even more perfect, Crosby would not only be playing with Lemieux in the aging star’s final seasons, but he would be living with him. It was the arrival of the prodigal son.

I like it, the editor said.

I’m terrified, the writer said when she called.

Shawna Richer was as worried they might accept her idea as she was concerned they might not go for it. It was, after all, an audacious notion: to spend an entire season following around a kid who would be all of eighteen when you were completing what would stand, in essence, as his life story . . . so far.

She called and we talked about it, and I said I thought it was an idea filled with possibilities – though, frankly, neither of us could even remotely imagine what would happen. A few weeks later, the Globe decided it was a go and told her to relocate to Pittsburgh for the year and prepare to spend the entire season with Sidney Crosby.

There was no doubt Shawna could do the job. She had, even before this assignment, a reputation as a stellar reporter. I had covered provincial elections and federal elections with her, and even the World Junior Hockey Championships in Halifax. She had started out as a sports reporter, was excellent at it, and knew the game she would be covering. But there was more to it than that. Shawna Richer burns with a passion for reporting that is, perhaps, fitting for one with the best head of red hair in the business. She is dogged, determined, fair, and thorough. She also writes wonderfully well. It may be sexist to suggest this – yet even more foolish not to – but the fact that she is a woman writing in what has unfortunately usually been a male domain is also significant. In thirty years of writing about sports off and on, I have long been aware that a woman writing about sports comes at it from a welcome and different perspective. Less complicated statistics, more simple equations. Less what is going on in the game than what might be going on in the head or in the life away from the playing field. The ability of Shawna Richer, and so many other women sports reporters, to draw male athletes out and reveal their inner thoughts is something most male sports reporters can only envy.

Sidney Crosby might have been an obvious choice at first, but he grew into an inspired choice – even if no one, himself included, quite saw what was coming. He was immediately seen in Canada as the answer to tomorrow; the gifted player who could accept that clichéd torch and carry Canada on to presumed glory in the game we so desperately wished the world to take up, but equally desired the world not to take up quite as well as it had in recent years. Gretzky and Lemieux had restored Olympic glory to Canada; if anyone could sustain it, it would be this kid from Cole Harbour with the low centre of gravity and the slightly goofy smile.

The weight of this role is difficult to comprehend for those who have never felt it on their shoulders. Hockey is not just the national game of Canada, but, as poet Richard Harrison once put it, the national id. It is how Canadians define themselves, see themselves, imagine themselves. The singular event where Canadians of a certain age mark themselves – just as Americans of a certain age remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot – is September 28, 1972, when, at 19:26 of the third period, Paul Henderson scored the winning goal against the Soviet Union. Hockey is Canada’s game, Ken Dryden and I wrote many years ago in Home Game. It may also be Canada’s national theatre. . . . It is a place where the monumental themes of Canadian life are played out – English and French, East and West, Canada and the U.S., Canada and the world, the timeless tensions of commerce and culture, our struggle to survive and civilize winter.

Sidney Crosby might have been off to Pittsburgh to play, but he was really playing for Canada from the first drop of the puck. It was, everyone believed, certain to be a storybook year. He would be living and playing with Mario. The Penguins, once thought unsalvageable, had taken the new economic certainty and turned it into another sort of certainty – success in the new season. They would surround the youngster with some of the game’s best veterans – defenceman Sergei Gonchar, goaltender Jocelyn Thibault, forwards Ziggy Palffy, John LeClair, and Mark Recchi – and the team would rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, back to the glory days of the early 1990s. Not only would Crosby win the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year, a given, but the Penguins might even make a run at the Stanley Cup.

With her storyline set, Shawna set off for Pittsburgh and the Penguins’ training camp. It began as expected – he scored a point in his first game and looked not in the least like an eighteen-year-old – and the Penguins set off on a roll, but not the predicted one. And then it all unravelled. Gonchar couldn’t find his game. Palffy couldn’t find his passion and eventually quit. Lemieux couldn’t find his health and retired. Recchi got traded. The Penguins were so terrible that soon the coach was fired and, once the season was over, the general manager was similarly dispatched.

So much for the obvious storyline.

As for Sidney Crosby himself, he was soon second in the rookie scoring race to twenty-year-old Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals, a Russian phenomenon with astounding speed and an absolute obsession for firing pucks at nets. It was, indeed, a season of remarkable rookies – Ovechkin in Washington, defenceman Dion Phaneuf in Calgary, Boston forward Brad Boyes, New York Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist – and, at times, those who thought Sidney Crosby had already been given too much praise, and there were many who believed so, rather cavalierly dismissed him as just another gifted kid getting his predicted comeuppance in the big leagues. He wasn’t even selected to the Canadian Olympic team that headed off to Turin, Italy, where the chosen players promptly fell flat on their collective faces.

Disaster? Hardly. The simple, obvious storyline now became complicated, far more intriguing, far more interesting. How would Sidney Crosby perform with all the best-laid plans collapsing? How would he handle the unexpected, targetted criticism? How would his year turn out when the Penguins’ year was already, as they say in hockey circles, in the toilet?

I do not believe, in terms of a compelling book, Shawna Richer could have been more fortunate. What Crosby did, once Ovechkin moved far in front of him in the scoring race and Wayne Gretzky left him off the Olympic team, was decide to do it all on his own, if necessary. No Mario on the one wing, no Palffy on the other, no Gonchar playing as he had been expected – none of it mattered. Crosby simply took up with new linemates, younger and unknown, and went on a scoring spree – twenty-six points in his final thirteen games – that might well have seen him catch Ovechkin had the nhl season only gone on another week. He then headed off for the World Championships in Riga, Latvia, finally able to wear the Team Canada sweater he had hoped for in the Olympics. And though Canada failed to win a medal, the teenager led the tournament with eight goals and sixteen points and was chosen top forward.

The signal was simple and obvious: more to come.

Which means that Shawna Richer’s marvellous book, The Kid, is instantly essential reading for the future of Canadian hockey. And the time may even come when we look back on both the player and the book as classics of their genre.

— Roy MacGregor

Acknowledgments

The Kid, both as newspaper project and book, could not have happened without the complete and overwhelming support of the Globe and Mail, in particular editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon, who championed it from start to finish. Special thanks to executive editor Neil A. Campbell, who has always encouraged me to think big and who took my crazy, ambitious idea to Ed.

National editor Noreen Rasbach was the best project editor a writer could hope for. Her long-time friendship comforted me through a long season, and her editorial instinct was always right. Sports editor Steve Mcallister offered endless enthusiasm and a veteran’s ideas and input. Special thanks to deputy editor Sylvia Stead and managing editor Colin MacKenzie for unselfishly allowing me to research and write this book while juggling my real job. I am lucky to work for a brave, smart newspaper that gets it; for those of us who cherish writing, it is a wonderful place to call home.

Jackie Kaiser is the best in her business, as much supportive friend as literary agent. At McClelland & Stewart, Doug Pepper’s enthusiasm and vision was infectious. It was a privilege to work with Chris Bucci, whose care with the manuscript improved it immensely. Trena White also has a superb eye.

A book of this nature is at the mercy of its principal character, and mine was tremendous on the ice and giving of his time away from it. Thank you to the Crosby family for their kindness and patience during a season that often felt surreal. Pat Brisson, whose blessing throughout the project, and Dee Rizzo, who made me feel welcome in Pittsburgh, made all the difference.

I am grateful to the Penguins organization for their day-to-day assistance, especially Tom McMillan, Keith Wehner, and Todd Lepovsky. Michel Therrien, Eddie Olczyk, Eddie Johnston, Mike Yeo, Stephane Dube, Steve Latin, and Scott Johnson were patient and helpful. Phil Bourque, Bob Grove, Mike Lange, Paul Steigerwald, Bob Erry, Jack Riley, Ray Walker, and Joe Sager offered help, insight, and humour and made me feel part of their extended family. Special thanks to Billy Wareham, for all of the above and for serving as photo editor. The team generously opened its photo archives to me, and the book is much better for it.

Thank you to the Penguins players, a band of brothers if ever there was one. Even in a tragically disappointing season, they managed many magical moments on the ice and great human ones away from it. If they ever tired of indulging me in talking about their teammate and my going concern, they never showed it.

I am blessed to have gifted colleagues, friends, and mentors – whose roles so often overlap – who generously offered advice both on hockey and writing, places to work, and rousing encouragement. Chief among them are Susanne Craig, Kim Honey, Roy MacGregor, Joe Lapointe, Robert MacLeod, Carolyn Abraham, Stephanie Nolen, Christie Blatchford, Julie Caswell, Andrew Gorham, Scott Burnside, Andrea Baillie, and Dave Feschuk. Joan Astley at the Globe always helped to make everything easier. Thank you to the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia for use of the poet’s house. And to Marty Klinkenberg, who taught me to see the poetry in sports and inspired my love of sports writing so many years ago.

The Pittsburgh hockey beat writers adopted me and shared volumes of knowledge. Thanks to Dave Molinari and especially Karen Price and Robert Dvorchak, who made great company on the road, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman for his warm hospitality. Marc Lachappelle in Montreal offered important insights.

Most of all, I would like to thank my family – my mom and dad for encouraging my love of words and for nurturing my introspective side, and Darren, Rachel, Megan, and Emily, whom I love very much.

Shawna Richer

Chester, Nova Scotia

August 2006

1. The Arrival

It was a great day for hockey.

The National Hockey League entry draft held July 30, 2005, on a warm summer afternoon in downtown Ottawa was the most celebrated and significant selection day held in several decades. At the same time, it was entirely anti-climactic.

Hastily arranged after the nhl owners and players reached a deal to end an acrimonious 310-day lockout that forced cancellation of the 2004-2005 season, the draft starred the most desirable young hockey player to come along since Mario Lemieux arrived on the scene in 1984. A teenaged boy from a small village on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia was a lock to be the number one pick.

His name was Sidney Crosby. He had tousled dark hair and an abundant cowlick, bee-stung lips, a generous, toothy grin, and in most lights he resembled exactly what he was – a boy still sixteen days shy of his eighteenth birthday. For someone who had not yet played a single shift of professional hockey, he was already remarkably famous.

Several seasons before the ugly labour dispute shut down Canada’s beloved pastime, the 2005 nhl draft became billed as the Sidney Crosby Sweepstakes. For years, his childhood scoring prowess had been widely known throughout the Maritimes. He was thrust into the national spotlight at the age of fourteen after a remarkable mvp performance in what was then called the Air Canada Cup, the country’s championship tournament for midget-aged players, in April 2002. Crosby went on to set records in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League with the Rimouski Oceanic – his 135 points as a sixteen-year-old was the most by a player that age in the Quebec league’s history and second in Canadian Hockey League history, behind only Wayne Gretzky’s 182 points with Sault Ste. Marie in 1977-1978. In what had become the most often repeated tale of his young life so far, Crosby’s reputation was bolstered even further when Gretzky himself told a sportswriter with the Arizona Republic that the Canadian youngster was the only player he had ever seen who had a shot at breaking his own numerous nhl scoring records.

The draft order had been set a week earlier, but even before that Crosby had eagerly promised to don the sweater of whichever team selected him. That he would play in the nhl was a highly anticipated certainty, one of the few things about the league’s return to action that autumn that was predictable. Even more than the ratification of the collective bargaining agreement by the National Hockey League Players’ Association and its subsequent unanimous acceptance by the league’s thirty owners, this draft marked the return of hockey and the birth of the nhl’s renaissance. Sidney’s arrival in the nhl didn’t just coincide with hockey’s homecoming, it more or less launched it.

The league was desperately in need of a saviour, a gifted, gracious poster boy who could help repair the widespread damage caused by the previous season’s strike and the flood of negative publicity that ensued. Crosby had already been christened the Next One, just as several other players, chiefly Eric Lindros and Joe Thornton, had been at one time. But already Crosby seemed different from those who had come before. The easy play on Gretzky’s nickname, the Great One, came by both timing and Crosby’s extraordinary hockey gifts – unarguably more profound than Lindros’s or Thornton’s – which were obvious at every previous level of competition. He had uncommon lower-body strength and an uncanny scoring touch, remarkable vision and playmaking abilities that channelled Gretzky himself. Crosby was also telegenic and almost unbelievably poised for a teenager; he wanted the responsibility the nhl had unofficially foisted upon him. Like so few up-and-coming hockey stars who had come this way before, Crosby wanted to be the guy, the game’s next ambassador. The game needed a kid like him. With the lockout ending so suddenly a few weeks earlier – Crosby had given thought to playing in Europe if the dispute had continued into another season – there hadn’t been time for much of a courtship. But it hardly seemed necessary. Shotgun or not, it was the perfect marriage.

In an irony that was irresistible to fans, the league, and the writers and broadcasters who covered the sport, Crosby was to be chosen by the Pittsburgh Penguins, just as Mario Lemieux, the last young hockey player to cause so much fuss, had been twenty-one years earlier.

July 22, 2005, was a great day for the Penguins, and as their late Stanley Cup–winning coach Badger Bob Johnson used to declare, It was a great day for hockey.

The Penguins, the nhl’s worst franchise the last time the league played, had been blessed by, of all things, a simple, indiscriminate lottery ball.

I listened to the nhl draft lottery on the radio as I drove through a late afternoon nor’easter home to Halifax from the Miramichi region of New Brunswick, where I had been on assignment. It was compelling theatre. The lottery, with forty-eight balls in all, was weighted based on each team’s record and draft order from previous seasons. It offered the Penguins, New York Rangers, Columbus Blue Jackets, and Buffalo Sabres the best chances of winning the right to draft Crosby with three balls each in the bin. Ten other teams had two balls each while the rest, including the Tampa Bay Lightning, Stanley Cup winners in 2004, each had just one ball to dream on.

The lottery was conducted in a closed room in a midtown Manhattan hotel. As Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly watched over the lottery itself, Commissioner Gary Bettman addressed reporters and tidied up some official business on a small set nearby, announcing that the collective bargaining agreement had been accepted by the nhl board of governors and explaining some of the new rules. When you look back in a year, five, ten, this era in history will be viewed as a pivotal point in time, Bettman said. It’s the time we could begin to move forward, finally in an effective way where the game could be as good as it could be. This will probably be a seminal moment. When the balls finished dropping, Bettman theatrically read the picks in descending order.

It was one of the most entertaining bits of live news drama I had witnessed in some time. Would Crosby, who grew up worshipping the Montreal Canadiens because they drafted his father, Troy, as a goaltender back in 1984, end up a Hab, his sentimental preference? Or would he be won by a struggling southern franchise that could use a charismatic star to sell the game in a non-traditional hockey market? Would he – heaven forbid – end up a Maple Leaf? Or would he land in New York, where it was felt by many league and marketing folks that he could have the greatest immediate impact on promoting the game in the United States?

In Canada, fans had been angered by the lockout – an Ipsos-Reid poll and mountains of anecdotal evidence found they blamed the stalemate and lost season on the players almost two-to-one over the owners. Truth be told, fans’ dismay had been simmering for some time, thanks to escalating player salaries – the league lost $273 million in 2002-2003, according to a study commissioned by the nhl – enormously expensive ticket prices, and a dearth of entertaining play on the ice. The game had become dominated by clutching and grabbing and the deadly dull defensive trap. The nhl was slow and tedious, almost unbearable to watch, and fans were tuning out. The lockout was the last straw for some, even as it turned out to be the best thing to happen to the game. The lockout that hurt so many and destroyed so much may well have saved hockey.

In the months the nhl was gone, letters-to-the-editor pages in newspapers across Canada were filled with scorn, indifference, and pledges to ignore the great game should it ever return. Emotions ranged from disgust over what was seen as abject greed by rich players and even wealthier owners to ambivalence over the kind of product the nhl had on offer. Although it was the only professional sports league on the planet to lose an entire season to a labour dispute, that the nhl stopped playing for a year barely registered in most of the United States, where hockey had been a distant fourth professional sport in many cities, after baseball, football, and basketball, with only a fringe following in less traditional hockey markets, behind even nascar.

At the end of the day, everybody lost, Wayne Gretzky, managing partner and coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, said at the time. "We almost crippled our industry. It was very disappointing what happened. For everyone to say ‘all right, let’s forgive and forget, let’s move forward,’ that’s all fine and good but it’s a lot easier said than done. It’s going to take a long time. It’s going to take a lot of hard work.

We disappointed a lot of people and I don’t mean the average fan. I’m talking about tv partnerships, corporate partnerships, the fan, the guy who goes to one or two games a year with his son. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. It’s not going to all change and be nice overnight.

Yet in Canada, when the news broke on July 13 that the league and players’ association had reached an agreement and the lockout was about to end, it felt as though an entire nation exhaled. For the most part, Canadians wanted the nhl back and were willing to give the new-look league, with its rule changes and salary cap and commitment to parity and the Olympics, the benefit of the doubt. If the new nhl was going to begin to succeed, the league needed fans’ forgiveness. In Canada at least, it looked as though they would get it.

It was a brilliant marketing move on the nhl’s part to broadcast the draft lottery on television and radio in Canada and via espn News on tv and satellite radio in the United States. The hour-long event turned out to be a harbinger of the captivating and entertaining season that ultimately unfolded. The nhl had not offered a show worth tuning in to since the Lightning beat the Calgary Flames in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final on June 7, 2004.

With the Penguins, Rangers, Blue Jackets, and Sabres ahead of the game with the most balls in the lottery, Bettman began unsealing the envelopes.

As he announced the teams that would miss their chance to land the seventeen-year-old rising star, I held my breath a bit. I had written about Crosby during the World Junior tournament the previous winter. I spent an afternoon with his parents, Troy and Trina, at their home the weekend before Christmas 2004 for a story on his childhood that ran in the Globe and Mail during the tournament that was played in North Dakota and saw the Canadians win gold for the first time since 1997. And I had seen him play as a junior whenever the Rimouski Oceanic visited the Halifax Mooseheads; Crosby had six points on one of the nights I watched. It was impossible not to root for him to land somewhere that would be good for him and good for hockey. Not Toronto, where the daily scrutiny of the Maple Leafs rivalled that of the Prime Minister’s Office and could crush a young player. And not Nashville, where his prodigious talents might not be appreciated. And not San José, where the four-hour time difference and revamped, unbalanced schedule meant his fellow Nova Scotians might never get to watch him play on television.

Anticipation grew as Bettman revealed the losers. In fitting fate, the Tampa Bay Lightning fell dead last. Then the Florida Panthers, Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, St. Louis Blues, New Jersey Devils, Boston Bruins, and Toronto Maple Leafs, in twentieth place. Then the Philadelphia Flyers, Detroit Red Wings, Nashville Predators, Phoenix Coyotes, New York Rangers, New York Islanders, Washington Capitals, Buffalo Sabres, San José Sharks, and Los Angeles Kings, in tenth spot. Finally came the Vancouver Canucks, Ottawa Senators, Atlanta Thrashers, Chicago Blackhawks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Montreal Canadiens at fifth spot, Minnesota Wild, and Carolina Hurricanes.

As ten teams were ruled out, tsn, the national sports network reporting live from Cole Harbour, cut live to the Crosby family rec room for the young man’s reaction. It was unprecedented coverage for a draft lottery. Satellite trucks and a half-dozen reporters idled on the Crosbys’ quiet neighbourhood crescent.

On the radio the suspense played wonderfully. With the Pittsburgh Penguins and Anaheim Mighty Ducks the only two teams remaining, Bettman paused a few beats before divulging that the first overall pick would