A Crosby Sweat-uh

While literally stepping onto a bus late afternoon on Friday I got a telephone call from my friend and pastor telling me the Penguins had won the draft lottery. I laughed loudly and spontaneously. How else do you respond when something as fickle as the bouncing of ping-pong balls determines that a natural-born superstar will put on your team's sweater instead of that of the any of the other disappointed teams? It's pure luck. The Penguins didn't even have to lose a large quantity of games to get into this position, as they and several other teams would have readily done, and as the Penguins admittedly did during the middle and late stages of the 1983-84 season, when they lost their way to the top draft pick that allowed them to grab Mario Lemieux. That move paved the way to the franchise actually accomplishing something, and even if that "something" included the initiation of a draft lottery in the NHL, well, it was undeniably worth it.

There's something approaching consensus among hockey insiders that Sidney Crosby has the sort of can't-miss, destined-for-stardom skillset that hasn't been seen in a teenager since Lemieux himself and Wayne Gretzky before him. Of course, that's the standard accolade trotted out for special prospects at draft-time, and it made the rounds as recently as last year, when Russia's Alexander Ovechkin's ball bounced to the Capitals instead of the worst-overall Penguins. The label has also been applied to some first-overall picks who became real stars, like Ilya Kovalchuk, some star-caliber players who were never quite able to get their arms around the needed leadership qualities, like Eric Lindros, and also to players who were simply busts, like Alexander Daigle. Of course, it's quite conceivable that Crosby's the product of unfair and inaccurate hype and that he won't detonate the league scoring records, but it's difficult to imagine him having a more opportune situation than this team and this season.

Unless they're able to adapt quickly, it won't be a good regular season for the Devils and the Wild and everybody else making a living off clogging the neutral zone, hooking everything that moves and holding on to 2-1 leads. As much pleasure as it gives me to write that sentence, it comes with the huge caveat which reveals me to be the naive dreamer I am: for the game to change, the League must make the officials change; there can no longer be any question about who controls the way the game is played. After the way in which the League waited out the NHLPA and forcefed the NFL financial model to the players, I'd hate to see them lose all resolve in dealing with the officials.

Back to my naive dreaming: Crosby will skate center on a line with Mario, who'd generally prefer to play wing these days anyway. There's buzz about the team signing a free agent or two; names like Alex Kovalev, Ziggy Palffy and Scott Niedermeyer are being repeated. A curious report in the Post-Gazette had the team making a run at signing aging pugilist Tie Domi for superstar protection. Had a parallel move been made in 1984-- if Mario had been given his Marty McSorely-- it might have saved hundreds of unavenged cross-checks to his wonky back and some of those surgeries and missed games might not have been needed. So protection for #87 will be a given. And with the return of Mark Recchi, the emergence of Ryan Malone and the question mark of three young Russians-- Aleksey Morozov, Konstantin Koltsov and Evgeni Malkin-- there's some developing or developed goal-scoring skill already on the roster to complement him. The team still has significant weaknesses on paper-- the defense corps needs a veteran presence or two, and the goaltending tandem is wildly talented but unproven-- but spending time under the tutelage of Mario Lemieux on a team that's always encouraged offensive creativity in a League newly and desperately looking for high-octane offense should be the best possible thing for Crosby.

It's funny to think of how many of the most significant events in Penguins history have been tied to the draft. Eddie Johnston, then-GM, has all but copped to a series of intentionally-terrible personnel moves during the 1983-84 season which put the team in position to finish worse than every other team in the league. While it's worthwhile to ask how that strategy differed from their management strategy every other year up to that point, and for a few after, it's clear that when first prize is Mario Lemieux and second prize is Peter Stastny, you should pull out all the stops. For several other years, the team had no first-round pick at all after trading it for some nondescript grinder. Then in 1990, right when the team had started to assemble the pieces of a strong supporting cast, the four teams drafting ahead of the Penguins decided that Owen Nolan, Keith Primeau, Mike Ricci and Petr Nedved had more promising careers ahead of them than did Jaromir Jagr. Those four are all very good players, but none of them had or has Jagr's game-breaking ability and leadership-by-example, at least as he displayed those qualities before he left the Penguins. Does the team win Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992 with one of those other guys in Jagr's place in the lineup? I really doubt it. None of those players had the sort of immediate impact Jagr did, and over a decade later I can still remember his almost ridiculous strength in winning battles for the puck along the boards and scoring big, timely playoff goals in those two years. Plus, for the rest of the nineties he won at least three playoff series by himself.

The team traded up to get the first overall pick in 2003, and while the extent of Marc-Andre Fleury's potential to be a game-stealing goalie isn't yet clear, it was a good pick. The team finished last overall in 2003-2004, but lost the draft lottery and the right to pick Russian phenom Alexander Ovechkin. At the time, that felt like a significant loss despite the fact that the second pick-- Evgeni Malkin-- is highly-skilled and was the consensus second-best player available. Now that lottery loss is looking in hindsight like an unbelievable win. Few details have been released concerning how the NHL structured last Friday's impromptu lottery draft. Extra balls were allotted to teams which had been the league's "worst" over the recent past, though I don't know if it's been said exactly how many seasons were taken into account to comprise that group. It seems highly unlikely to me that the Penguins would have received that sort of preferred lottery status had they won the lottery in 2004. They lost the battle and won the war.

Another big winner in this deal is Comcast. They're now guaranteed whatever hook-up fee and monthly charge I'll need to follow the team when I can't get down there. And I'll need to decide whether it's unseemly for me to own the jersey of a kid who's exactly half my age until his eighteenth birthday comes in a few months. I'm thinking if Beaks can have his LeBron jersey, then I'm not out of bounds in getting a Crosby sweat-uh. A Crosby sweat-uh. Man, I like the sound of that.