Sidney Crosby: How does he do it?

A quantum leap in hockey history: a player built by trainers from the
skates up

CHARLIE GILLIS | April 23, 2007 |

At 19 years old, Sidney Crosby is unquestionably the Next One -- the
eye-popping puck skills, the studied humility, the precocious
self-confidence are all present in the star centre of the Pittsburgh
Penguins. So too is the inner fire prized in this game above all else,
that thing which lifts a talented player into the realm of immortals
like Bobby Orr or Maurice Richard. But to fully appreciate Crosby's
place in the evolution of hockey -- a place identifiable even now, in
his sophomore season -- you need to go back. Back to the year before
Crosby was born, and for the sake of this argument, to a statement of
hockey principle that might have been dismissed at the time as a
snippet of boozy rambling.

It was the summer of 1986, and the Edmonton Oilers were on top of the
world. In the spirit of aiding history, a few key members of the team
admitted filmmakers Terence and Bob McKeown to their inner sanctum to
make a documentary. The resulting movie, Boys on the Bus, is pretty
much the definitive Oiler hagiography, worth watching mostly for a
dinner sequence at Mark Messier's apartment in which Wayne Gretzky,
Kevin Lowe, Paul Coffey and Messier argue about the key to success in
hockey. After an illuminating, at times comical exchange, Gretzky ends
all argument with a curt summation of his personal on-ice philosophy.
"I want that puck," he says across a forest of half-filled glasses.
"And you guys," he adds, tossing his head at imaginary opponents, "you
guys get your own puck."

The man was no puck hog, of course. He assisted 1,963 goals. But in
this one slightly slurred dictum, the Great One distilled the measure
of a player in the bygone NHL -- namely, the ability to
single-handedly control time and space on the ice. Today, the idea
sounds quaint. Even as Gretzky spoke, rival coaches were devising ways
to reclaim the ice from players whose pure talent slowed the game and
governed the actions of opponents.

By the time Sidney Crosby appeared on the radar of NHL scouts, pro
hockey had evolved into a chess match of "traps" and "locks" and
"defensive systems" designed to foil scorers, which may explain why
Crosby sought to diminish expectations whenever Gretzky comparisons
arose. "No one is going to touch his numbers," he told Maclean's in
2005, invoking a theme he maintains to this day. "It was just a
different league back then."

Now, as he makes his first appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs,
there's a palpable hope that Crosby is about to defy his own
prediction. The pride of Cole Harbour, N.S., finished his second
season with a league-leading 120 points, a pace comparable to
early-vintage Gretzky but in a league that -- for all its crowing
about a crackdown on obstruction -- remains much more defensively
oriented than it was in the mid-1980s. On March 2, he became the
youngest player in history to reach 200 career points (19 years and
207 days -- 147 fewer days than Gretzky), playing a game so precise
and disciplined that you can hardly tell it's revolutionary. For
Crosby, hockey is less about controlling the ice surface than
controlling the nine square feet around his skates.

Consider a pair of unlikely scoring chances he created late in the
season. On Feb. 10 in Toronto, Crosby shot directly into the shin pads
of an advancing defender during a Penguins power play, then showed
lightning-fast reflexes to regain the puck, duck past the shot
blocker, bulldoze through the next two checkers and -- somehow -- get
another crack at the net. His second shot glanced off a flailing arm,
and the whole thing happened so fast the Leafs might have thought it a
fluke. If so, they hadn't been watching their tapes: the play was an
exact replica of one Crosby pulled off two nights earlier in
Philadelphia, producing a juicy rebound which linemate Mark Recchi
jabbed into the net.

Not pretty, as highlight sequences go. But as an exhibition of talent,
agility, balance, bull-like strength and sheer will, it was uniquely
Sidney Crosby. Which is another way of paying him the greatest
compliment a hockey player could hear: Wayne Gretzky could never have
done it.

"Look in his eyes," murmurs Mike Lange, the veteran play-by-play man
for WXDX radio in Pittsburgh. "Everything you need to know about him
is right there, in his eyes." We're watching Crosby and his teammates
go through a morning skate in Ottawa, pondering exactly how he does
it. Lange's observation is both accurate and pleasingly mystical:
Crosby is indeed possessed of a black, burning stare -- like Maurice
Richard's, only seemingly directed inward. But to portray his success
purely as a function of determination is to overlook the quantum leap
he represents to hockey history.

To perform that leap, Crosby had to forego the very kind of
romanticism that tends to infuse ideas of how a star is made. While
the Howes and Orrs who came before him plotted a course across frozen
ponds and backyard rinks, Crosby is a hothouse specimen, a player
built from the skates up to conquer a highly systematized game. Yes,
nature supplied the raw materials of strength, character, vision and
unheard of motor skills. But the assembly was performed by others -- a
hockey-playing father; instructors at high-performance hockey camps;
coaches at the Minnesota prep school he attended for a year. And the
most important influence of all proved to be a soft-spoken Prince
Edward Islander with some novel ideas about how to succeed at hockey.

Andy O'Brien remembers well the first day he saw Crosby. He was
teaching at an elite hockey camp in Summerside, where young Sidney,
just out of elementary school, was skating with boys two years his
senior. "We'd been hearing about a player there who was said to be the
best 13-year-old in the world," recalls O'Brien, then freshly
graduated from the University of Western Ontario's kinesiology
program. "But when I realized that this was the player they were
talking about, I thought, 'Good lord, this kid needs some work.' He
was lumbering around a bit out there."

Now the strength and fitness coach for the Florida Panthers, O'Brien
was a bit of a radical thinker -- at least by hockey standards. For
years, he'd watched in bemusement as top-level players feverishly
pumped iron in the off-season, even though studies had long ago proven
that building muscle mass indiscriminately could actually diminish
performance in high-tempo sports. Far more important, he knew, is the
ability to work specific muscle groups in concert at high speed, and
with picture-perfect form. Yet there the hockey guys were, puffing up
their pecs and ballooning their thighs like they were preparing for
beefcake contests.

Much of this stemmed from a basic misunderstanding of hockey's unique
effects on the anatomy, according to O'Brien. As a sport played on
metal blades across a low-friction surface, the game demands work from
body parts never really meant for the job. While running or jumping
sports use muscles meant to produce vertical force, skating requires
horizontal exertion from those that provide stability -- the outer
quadriceps, the lateral hamstrings and a pair of gluteal muscles
called the piriformis and the medias. If you could increase the
efficiency of those groups, O'Brien reasoned, shortening the time they
required to contract while increasing the amount of force produced,
you could build a much, much better hockey player.

So in the late 1990s, he devised a workout regimen to do just that.
What he needed was a top-drawer player entering the most important
phase of his development -- a teenager whose neuromuscular responses
could be super-programmed for maximum performance.

Enter Crosby and his parents, Trina and Troy, a working class family
looking for someone who, at a modest price, would transform an
uncommonly talented boy into a surefire NHL prospect. Thus began a
five-year experiment that would eventually produce the best player in
the world. O'Brien happened to be moving to Halifax, so the year
Crosby turned 14, he was on hand to oversee the youngster's daily
workouts at the St. Mary's University athletic centre. The pair spent
hours working on Crosby's posture, using exercises unlike anything
hockey players did at the time: the teenager would jump, skip, sprint,
duck under hurdles, even do somersaults on mats while O'Brien studied
his movements -- all with a view to correcting mechanical flaws in his
hip extension or coordinating the angles of his knees and ankles. Then
came exercises aimed at building balance and stability. Crosby would
teeter, see-saw style, on a piece of plywood balanced on a length of
pipe while O'Brien surveyed his movements. "I'd hit him with all the
force I could to try to knock him off," recalls O'Brien, "or I'd throw
a medicine ball at him. As he became more efficient, we tried to
create inefficiency in his environment so he could continue to progress."

The sessions were gruelling, but Crosby was pleased with the results,
and today, he keeps up the same off-season regimen. "With all the
speed and youth in the game, it's important to have that extra step,"
he explains in an interview. (O'Brien stopped overseeing his workouts
after getting the Panthers job, but the two remain close friends.)
"That's something I'm always trying to gain so, honestly, a lot of the
stuff I do is pretty athletic."

Examples? "Sprint intervals of 200 or 300 m. I'll do three or four
pretty quick and close together. And I almost always put my body in
some sort of unnatural position, then try to keep doing the exercise
fast and strong. That's worked well for me. If it's hurdles or cones
or hill running, I'll do it with a weight belt on one side, or maybe a
medicine ball."

It's not as simple as replicating hockey movements on dry land, Crosby
stresses. Rather, the workouts are meant to prepare his body to
withstand the game's rigours. "On the ice, you're always kind of
leaning, or digging in and changing position. Balance and flexibility
become very important. A lot of people forget how important it is to
be athletic and to focus on moving your body well."

He's not really sure how much of his success can be attributed to
these preparations. But O'Brien knows what he saw when he attended a
game in Halifax during Crosby's rookie year with the Rimouski Oceanic
of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. In almost every vital
department -- hand speed, leg strength, balance, agility, and most
importantly, foot speed -- his young charge surpassed everyone on the
ice. Today, NHL opponents speak with similar awe of Crosby's
"completeness" as an athlete. "What doesn't he do?" asks Senators
defenceman Wade Redden. "He's good on the puck. He's quick, he's
strong, he's got a great shot and he knows how to find his teammates.
He's a special, special player."

Of course, not everybody appreciates "special, special" players. And
many of those who don't live in the city of Philadelphia. The team
once known as the Broad Street Bullies was laid low this season by
injuries and managerial incompetence. But the Flyers' fans can still
get a decent hate on, and Crosby is their new favourite target. Boos
fill the Wachovia Center each time he touches the puck. Epithets, most
of them unprintable, fly down from the stands. Tonight, in a
late-season encounter between the two teams, the Flyers show they plan
to get in his face all evening, sending a charge of unaccustomed
optimism through the crowd.

With that begins a series of unpenalized assaults -- a blindside by
Ben Eager; a two-hand slash across the gloves by Joni Pitkanen; an
all-out lunge by Derian Hatcher, a six-foot-five, 235-lb. defencemen,
which Crosby (five-foot-ten, 203 lb.) narrowly avoids. Later, in the
third period, Hatcher catches him in from the Philadelphia bench with
a forearm to the chest, bending his spine across the boards. The
incident looks dangerous, and as he skates away uninjured Crosby casts
a glare toward referee Kerry Fraser. But the play goes on, and
Philly's ugly strategy is working. By the end of regulation time, the
Flyers are tied with the high-flying Penguins 4-4. Crosby hasn't
recorded a point.

Gorilla tactics have always been considered a form of flattery in
hockey. Gretzky faced them; so did Mario Lemieux before their
respective coaches brought in protection. When Crosby arrived in the
fall of 2005, however, there was a fervent hope that the thugs were on
their way out -- that he was the cutting edge of an offensive
renaissance that would eventually render intimidation obsolete.

This was a delusion born partly of Crosby's imperviousness to rugged
play. "He'll turn around and shove it right back up their asses," is
how Mark Recchi, Crosby's veteran linemate, describes the youngster's
resilience. But cheap shots are cheap shots, and by the time he hit
Philadelphia, frustration was plainly affecting Crosby's judgment. The
first sign of trouble came during a Feb. 4 visit to Montreal, when he
went down rather theatrically after getting clipped in the face by a
Canadien's stick in the third period. With the crowd chanting "faker!
faker!" Crosby was sucked into an argument on his way back to the
bench with Aaron Downey, a fringe player who later admitted he was
trying to get under Crosby's skin. "Sidney's a superstar," he shrugged
happily. "I'm just a slug in this league, a tow-truck driver."

For the rest of the game, and for many more after it, Crosby seemed
jangled. In overtime, he took an uncharacteristic tour around the
Canadiens' net, dipsy-doodling back out to the blue line and trying a
shot that hit Habs forward Tomas Plekanec in the leg. In a blink, the
speedy Montreal centre had turned the puck up ice on a two-on-one,
teeing up the winning goal for defenceman Sheldon Souray. The
freeze-out in Philly came four nights later, and while he did score
the winning goal in a shootout, Crosby seemed less elated with victory
than exasperated by the preceding 65 minutes. Slipping his feet into
the yellow Crocs he keeps by his dressing-room stall, he took
"personal responsibility" for his line's declining output, telling the
crush of reporters: "I had a lot going through my mind."

The effects were showing on the stats sheet, too. Having set a torrid
pace of 1.71 points per game since the start of the season, Crosby
registered less than a single point over the dozen outings following
the Montreal game. He denied that escalating harassment was derailing
his play. But some of his remarks had a pleading undertone. "I think
I've done a pretty good job keeping my emotions in check," he told
Maclean's a few weeks after the Downey encounter. "But I am human. I
play with a lot of intensity and there will be times when I get upset."

Should the league have solved the problem with some decent refereeing?
Without a doubt. Crosby is universally regarded as the league's crown
jewel, a scoring machine with movie-star looks. But seldom has the
game's greatest asset been so inclined to -- in Recchi's words --
"shove it up their asses." In the end, Pens general manager Ray Shero
settled things the old way, cutting a late-season deal with Phoenix to
acquire Georges Laraque, a six-foot-three, 243-lb. forward who is
generally considered the heavyweight champion of the league. The trade
put to rest any illusion you could nettle Crosby -- physically,
verbally or any other way -- without risking serious head injury.

The brief tempest over Crosby's security was just one example of the
argument he stirs wherever he goes, debate caused primarily by the
fact he's tougher than the familiar image of a scoring star. Gretzky's
supple eccentricities, after all, constituted an unmistakable
prototype -- a model that spawned a generation of lesser imitators
like Petr Nedved and Craig Janney. Lemieux fell into a much older
tradition of elegant giants -- Jean Beliveau, Frank Mahovlich and,
later, Jaromir Jagr. All of these players demonstrated that familiar
I-want-that-puck urge to control play, pulling defenders out of
position and using the open ice to create offence.

Crosby, by contrast, assumes the appearance of a hard-grinding forward
even when he's carrying the puck: he'll let a checker do his worst,
widening his stance to protect the disc until he gets the chance to
move it, or he'll dish it off before an opponent can lay a stick on
him. Either way, he doesn't require open ice to create goals, which
tends to confuse critics who attend his games with visions of Gretzky
dancing in their heads. "Crosby is, well, more conventional," declared
a mid-season profile in Sports Illustrated, adding that the young
Penguin "isn't reinventing the game, he's merely playing it at a
rarified level."

Why, then, do his opponents sound so non-plussed? "I think everyone's
trying to figure him out," says Toronto's Chad Kilger, one of the
league's premiere defensive forwards. "If the play's there, you got to
hit him, but you can't run around and try to be too physical or you're
going to wind up in the penalty box." Factor in the crackdown on
obstruction and stick penalties, say others, and Crosby's physical
advantages multiply. "I don't know if there's a defenceman in the
league right now that can handle him one-on-one when he gets
position," says Senators coach Bryan Murray. "When he puts that hip
out and starts to pivot, he's very hard to take off the puck. And you
can't put the stick on him anymore in the way people have done in the
past."

If you're looking for ways in which Crosby has influenced the game,
this is a pretty good place to start. For the better part of two
decades, smart coaches have been answering offensive firepower with
defensive set plays designed to take away the kind of space Gretzky
and his ilk feasted upon. As Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender
and all-round hockey philosopher recently noted, these systems grew
out of the realization that the checker's higher relative speed and
the simplicity of his task (i.e. he doesn't have to focus on
stickhandling) give him an edge over even the most talented puck
carrier. They may be maligned for their stultifying effect on the flow
of the game, but they're merely the product of common sense.

Crosby's genius has been to erase that imbalance: the efficiencies
O'Brien and he worked so hard to achieve permit him to receive, carry
and unload the puck at blinding speeds, often with little more than a
synchronic spasm of body muscle. He may be the best player in the
league at directing the puck with one or two touches of the stick and
-- most importantly -- he almost never relinquishes the ice beneath
him. When the puck comes his way, the checker's supposed advantage is
lost.

None of this is to say that teams won't someday unlock the secret to
controlling him. Most sports, after all, operate on cycles of
innovation followed by strategic adjustment (in baseball, for example,
hitters answered the 100-mph fastball with greater upper body strength
which, in turn, increased bat speed). But it's a lot more fun to
imagine they won't -- that Crosby will advance his game further,
expanding the gap between himself and his defenders and stretching the
magic seconds when he's carrying the puck into more high-light-reel
moments. He certainly resists interpretations of him as some sort of
icebound automaton, a guy who has set out to make his play in a
millisecond flat or consider his shift a failure. "I think it's part
of how you adjust and adapt to each game," he says when I observe how
little he actually carries the puck. "But you do still hope you're
going to get a lot of time to touch the puck and create plays. If that
doesn't happen, you know, you have to make the most of the
opportunities you do get with it. You have to make the right plays and
sometimes those are the simple ones. But you think to yourself that
maybe, later in the game, you'll get a chance to do something bigger
and better."

Tantalizingly, he spent the late season doing just that -- seeking out
the spectacular where the merely impressive might have served. In a
March 16 rematch with the Canadiens, he eluded four checkers
converging on him and released a shot while falling down that resulted
in one of the year's most miraculous goals. On the power play, he's
developed what might be considered a signature move, faking a shot
from the half-boards to freeze the checkers, then firing a light-speed
pass diagonally to Ryan Whitney, a left-side defenceman, for a
back-door shot. Over and over, the play succeeds, because defenders
know that the alternative -- peeling off to cover Whitney -- gives
Crosby an open lane to the net.

It has helped, too, that he is surrounded this season by a cast of
teenaged stars, who are helping create the open ice he'll need to
further raise his game. At 19 and 18 respectively, Evgeni Malkin and
Jordan Staal are two of the best prospects in the league. Goaltender
Marc-Andre Fleury, 22, is living up to his billing as a first-overall
draft pick, and a slew of others -- Ryan Malone, Erik Christensen and
Whitney -- help form the core of a team that went 31-7-5 during the
second half of the season.

The salutary effects of this can't be overstated. Better teammates
occupy opponents' attention, pulling top checkers away from the
first-line centre and helping build leads. That, in turn, forces teams
to take defensive risks. When he watches this group of youngsters,
André Savard, a former Canadiens GM who is now an assistant coach with
Pittsburgh, gets a bit of déjà vu. "If there's a resemblance," he
says, "it's to the Oilers back [in the early 1980s]. It's a team game
and you're going to win because of chemistry. So it's got to be nice
for Sidney to have other players stepping up."

Whether the Penguins have what it takes to win one Cup -- never mind
four, like the Gretzky-era Oilers -- is yet to be seen. As Crosby
himself says: "There's definitely a confidence level. But a sense of
something special? Who knows?" If that sounds a bit non-committal for
a guy about to face the acid test of an NHL playoff run, chalk it up
to his reflexive habit of trying to manage expectations. Crosby above
all understands that the ultimate measure of his impact on the league
lies ahead. Say all you want about team chemistry; fantasize at will
about a player surpassing Gretzky's 200-point seasons. But the grand
experiment that began with a lumbering 13-year-old at a P.E.I. hockey
camp will ultimately be evaluated in sips of champagne from Lord
Stanley's mug. And to get to that point, it's not just wanting the
puck that counts. It's what you do when you get it.