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Sidney Crosby makes emphatic statement in best player debate

Penguins Oilers Hockey

Edmonton Oilers’ Oscar Klefbom (77) skates past as Pittsburgh Penguins’ Patric Hornqvist (72), Sidney Crosby (87) and Kris Letang (58) celebrate Crosby’s goal during the first period of an NHL hockey game, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2018 in Edmonton, Alberta. (Codie McLachlan/The Canadian Press via AP)

AP

Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews.

Auston Matthews or Connor McDavid.

That is the discussion some folks around NHL have been trying to hold regarding which one of them is the new best player in the NHL.

Well, Sidney Crosby would like to remind you that ... yeah ... it might still be him.

If nothing else, he has made a pretty compelling argument for himself over the past week.

Crosby scored his first two goals of the season on Tuesday night to help lead his Pittsburgh Penguins to a wild 6-5 win over McDavid and the Oilers.

It’s not that McDavid didn’t also show up in this game; because he did, scoring a goal and assisting on another. But Crosby delivered the emphatic punch in overtime when he scored one of the most ridiculous goals of the season (so far) when he completely obliterated Ryan Strome (not a defenseman! And he was tired at the end of extended shift!) and did this ... with McDavid standing right next to it all.

My goodness.

This has been a fascinating week for Crosby as it relates to the “best player” debate, because his past two games have come against Toronto (Matthews) and Edmonton (McDavid) and he spent an awful lot of ice-time going head-to-head against both of them.

For the most part, he completely dominated them.

On Thursday night in Toronto he spent eight minutes of even-strength ice-time going against Matthews (more than any other Toronto forward).

Not only did Matthews fail to record a point or a shot, the Maple Leafs as a team didn’t even get a shot on goal during those minutes.

Over the two games total Crosby spent more than 20 minutes of even-strength ice-time going head-to-head against McDavid and Matthews. During those minutes the Penguins scored the only goal (Crosby’s overtime winner on Tuesday) and controlled more than 65 percent of the shot attempts.

At this point Sidney Crosby has entered the “latter day Steve Yzerman” phase of his career.

When Yzerman was a young player in Detroit he was such a monster offensively that if he played in any other era that didn’t have Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux playing at the exact same time he probably would have been regarded as the best offensive player in the league.

He was incredible.

Then around the time he hit his 30th birthday the offense started to drop off. It was -- and still is -- often times looked at as him sacrificing offense to improve his defense for the betterment of the team; but the more likely explanation is that he just got a little older and simply was not capable of scoring 120 points anymore.

So his game evolved and he became a ferocious two-way player that could take over games in other ways.

This is where Sidney Crosby is now.

He is in his age 31 season, and as such he is simply not going to be the offensive force he was when he was 24 or 25. He is still going to be capable of doing things like he did on Tuesday night when he ruined Ryan Strome’s night and posterized him, but he is not going to be the 110-point scoring champion every year. I mean, he has been an 89-point player pretty much four years in a row, and while that is still in the top 1 percent of the entire league, it is probably not going to result in a scoring title. This is what he is as an offensive player at this point, and that is fine.

But he is going to find other ways to impact the game and dominate it even when he is not lighting up the score sheet the way he once did. That is pretty much what he did the past two games when he went against the latest two players the hockey world has attempted to elevate above him, and completely outplayed them. If your best player can go against the other team’s best player and shut them down and cancel them out, you are going to have a lot of success.

He is also still on occasion going to do things like that overtime winner on Tuesday night.

(Stats in this post via Natural Stat Trick)

MORE: Your 2018-19 NHL on NBC TV schedule

Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.