Two of the greatest players of this generation are getting to that age where decline typically begins, with Sidney Crosby turning 30 next August and Alex Ovechkin already 31 years old.
As stars age, there’s a temptation to look for who will unseat them from the top of the pack.
For Crosby, that’s been going on for a while already — whether it’s a coach saying Claude Giroux was the best player in the world after a playoff series, or media pushing Jonathan Toews as the world’s best player on the strength of Olympic and playoff performances.
Now it’s Connor McDavid who is the obvious Next One — and some believe he’s already better than Crosby is at this point.
Despite how amazing McDavid is, the facts just don’t support that assertion yet.
Even disregarding defensive play — an area in which Crosby is significantly stronger than McDavid at this stage — Sid’s start to the season has been one of his best ever.
Aging curves are good indicators of when to expect most skaters’ play to fall a little, but there are always those who defy them — think Jaromir Jagr or Teemu Selanne — and it’s possible that both Crosby and Ovechkin will be those kinds of players.
Taking a look at both players, let’s see if there are signs of decline. We’ll start with Crosby:
What you’re looking at here is the most dominant offensive player in the game.
Not only is Crosby blowing the doors off the NHL in personal scoring chances (and creating them for teammates, too), he’s also one of the NHL’s most disruptive and successful forecheckers — not to mention, a zone entry machine.
What’s most impressive about this year’s start from Crosby is that he has improved by a staggering margin over most of these statistics from last season despite starting the season injured.
There isn’t much to be said about Crosby that hasn’t already been said over the last decade, but he is the ultimate hockey player.
He has the hockey sense you want in an elite player, but plays with the work ethic of a guy who might lose his job. There will be areas of Crosby’s game that will decline with age — he’s already not quite as fast a skater as he was when he broke into the league — but he makes up for it with edge work, agility, and intelligence.
As Crosby gets older, his game will change to maximize his output because he never stops refining it. This doesn’t mean that Crosby will continue to put up 85- to 100-point seasons until he’s 45 years old, but you can expect his decline to be much more gradual than his contemporaries.
As for Ovechkin, there hasn’t really ever been a player like him with the combination of goal-scoring consistency and health. Ovechkin has missed just 28 games over his 11 seasons coming into this year, and a huge chunk of that is due to suspensions, not injury.
Early last season, Steve Burtch wrote about where Ovechkin compares using era-adjusted goal-scoring. His findings ranked Ovechkin as the second best goal scorer of all time — though perhaps even that doesn’t quite do him justice.
Had he played in an era like the 1980s, he likely would have outperformed era-adjusted estimates of goal-scoring due to his pure shot volume.
Ovechkin is the unchallenged shot attempt king in the NHL, notching 1.62 more shot attempts per 20 minutes at even strength than the next best shooter, and 2.76 more shot attempts per 20 minutes in all situations.
That advantage doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
It’s true that Ovechkin’s shot attempt numbers do seem to be dipping slightly this season, but we have to remember that it’s early.
What’s interesting about Ovechkin, though, is that he had previously looked like he was in decline in his mid-20s but rebounded — and even improved — for three consecutive seasons overall due partially to power-play dominance.
Over this period of time, the median for shot attempt production per 20 minutes among regular forwards in all situations was 4.07, whereas Ovechkin has produced an average of 9.66 — over double.
When you factor in that Ovechkin’s shots are also of a higher quality than most, you see how he’s able to regularly score 50 goals.
There might be some concern about Ovechkin’s shot attempt numbers going down, but like Crosby, he has tricks up his sleeves.
While Ovechkin’s total shot attempt numbers have gone down, every bit of that loss has come from the perimeter.
Ovechkin is one of the rare players who can score from outside the slot regularly, but everyone scores at a higher rate from closer to the net. It seems like his focus so far this season is on getting himself better chances, and he’s only sacrificed 0.93 even-strength shot attempts — 1.04 in all situations per 20 minutes played — over the last season to do so. And of course, Ovechkin is still leading the league in shot attempts per 20 in all situations.
Sometimes, because we’re so focused on what’s coming next we fail to see the greatness in front of us for what it is.
Jaromir Jagr is appreciated today to the point where fans hope he never retires, but it wasn’t always that way. Often, we don’t truly appreciate the best of what players offer until it’s in the rearview mirror.
With Crosby and Ovechkin, we’re seeing two of the greatest players in the history of the game — and it’s something that needs to be savoured.
