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Have 2 of NHL’s top 3 of all time played for Penguins?

5 min read

I’ve been around a while.

I was an adult and well aware of what I was witnessing in 1971, when Roberto Clemente showed the world what everybody in Western Pennsylvania had known for years – that he had always been a superstar worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Mays, Mantle and Aaron – while he was leading the Pirates to a World Series win over the Baltimore Orioles.

I watched, and then covered as a TV reporter, a Steelers team loaded with Hall of Famers that won four Super Bowls in the 1970s, and I covered Mario Lemieux and a bunch of Penguins Hall of Famers when they won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992.

I never saw a player on any of those teams play better in a championship game or series than Sidney Crosby played against the Nashville Predators in Game 5 Thursday night.

And you don’t have to tell me that’s saying something.

He had three assists but could have had six, turned his usual 200-foot game up a notch and created an absurd separation between himself and everybody else on the ice.

It was actually a continuation of what he had done in a Penguins loss in Game 4 Monday night when, after scoring a Lemieux-esque goal to tie the game at 1-1, he set up chance after chance for teammates, who either fanned on shots or were stoned by Predators goalie Pekka Rinne.

Only someone who hasn’t been paying attention would balk, as some in the hockey media still do, at putting Crosby in the top five players of all time.

Another game or two like the two he just played, another Stanley Cup and another Conn Smythe Award, for which he would be the leading candidate, and it might be time to move him into the top three.

Wayne Gretzky, Lemieux and Bobby Orr are the consensus top three and their stats are impossible to match in an era when goals, because of gigantic, athletic goalies wearing gigantic pads are so hard to come by, but what separates Crosby from the Top 3 is that his greatness isn’t measured as much by points as theirs.

Lemieux was a tremendous 200-foot player in the playoffs and he was physically abused as much as Crosby because the NHL was just as stupid in 1990 as it is now, and Crosby took more abuse from P.K. Subban in Game 4 than Gretzky took in is entire career.

That’s not an exaggeration.

You just didn’t hit Gretzky.

I don’t know how Orr’s game – which included 46 goals and 89 assists in 1975 – would translate to the NHL in 2017, but I think Crosby would have been better in the 1980s and ’90s than Gretzky would be today.

Heresy, I know, and there’s no way to prove arguments involving players from different eras, but I think it’s possible that two of the three best players in NHL history played for the Penguins.

• Why is the NFL harassing James Harrison? Because he’s 39, can bench press your car and he led the Steelers in sacks last season? Seems kind of mean, doesn’t it?

Everybody knows how hard he works and he’s never failed a test.

Neither, as far as I can tell, has any NFL player tested positive for HGH. So is this story about the unfair harassment of a player or the ineffectiveness of the testing?

A player can take a dose of HGH today and if you test him tomorrow he’ll pass. So, unless Harrison or any other NFL player is randomly tested on the day that he used it, he’s not going to get caught.

The focus shouldn’t be on whether Harrison is being harassed. It should be on whether the tests are worth doing.

If it’s true that no NFL player has tested positive for HGH since the league and the NFL Players Association agreed to the testing, then this comment made by a veteran player to The Bleacher Report shouldn’t surprise anybody: “Steroids aren’t the problem. HGH is the big problem. For the past four or five years, the league has been almost overrun by HGH. … The new testing procedures aren’t catching anyone, because players know there is almost no way to get caught.”

Like the NFL’s marijuana policy, the player said, a player using HGH will only get caught “if the NFL gets really, really lucky, like win-the-Lotto-every-month lucky.”

Keep this in mind the next time the NFL passes a stupid rule that reduces the number of plays in order to cut down on injuries. Getting serious about reducing the size of players would show that the league and the players are really serious about reducing the amount of injuries.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.

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