Ovechkin vs Crosby

National Post editorial board: Ovechkin vs Crosby, a defining decision:
"We are not the first to say how fortunate hockey fans are to be enjoying another Sidney Crosby-Alexander Ovechkin playoff duel. In fact, we’re probably more like the thousandth. But there are so many reasons to be grateful that, even collectively, the hockey world’s editorialists are helpless to exhaust them all. Just consider, for example, the manner in which hockey’s Magic and Bird have re-energized and reinvented the old Canada-vs.-Russia tension that was part of our lives for 20 years. Back in the day, it was the Soviets who lacked individuality and presented the contemptuous demeanour of the soldier to the world; it was the Canadians who best expressed the love of the game as such, and reminded us of the reasons we still talk of “playing” hockey.

Today, time and events have changed the picture. For better or worse, it is our Mr. Crosby who is the straitlaced one, the self-conscious leader; Mr. Crosby who, for better or worse, may represent to the world’s hockey fans a homogenizing obsession with correctness and knowing one’s place in the order. And it is Mr. Ovechkin who represents creativity and glee and fire and insolence, who knows the game is a game and who is willing to take it off the ice (as he did when, with his team down 2-0 in the series, he showed up at a Rangers’ practice to talk smack and rattle his opponents). There can be no question which one of these players would fit in on, say, the ’74 Flyers of Bob Clarke and Fred Shero, and which one could be slotted into the old Russian KLM line for 10 minutes before anyone noticed.

That makes the question of rooting interests incredibly complex, and raises this sports rivalry to the highest level imaginable, a level at which the tides of history and the self-images of two great nations have their part to play.

There must be many households which have a young son who venerates Mr. Crosby patriotically — he’s handsome, good-natured, assiduous, stylish and hardly ever puts a foot wrong on the ice — and a father who, perhaps secretly, sees Mr. Ovechkin as being more like the heroes of his own youth. And yet, there must be as many more where the father sees Mr. Crosby as standing up for Canadian values, representing everything he wants his own child to become, while the son, responding with instinctive fellow-feeling to the boy barely hidden inside Mr. Ovechkin, goes to bed clutching his No. 8 jersey. At times like this, sport aspires, and quite successfully, to the qualities of an outstanding novel.

The difference is, nobody on earth knows what the next chapter will look like: Nobody can know until it is carved into the ice. Miraculously, the protagonists are just 23 and 21 years of age. And it is worth remembering that Mr. Crosby is still a great deal further from his physical and mental peak than Mr. Ovechkin; biologically, he has yet to reach his final form. But the opportunities for him to face his nemesis in the playoffs may not be many. The 30-team pro sports leagues of today are remorseless in their mathematical logic. For reasons of pure abstract combinatorics, they offer fewer opportunities for sustained rivalry, for the kind of multi-seasonal epics than Montreal and Boston, or Calgary and Edmonton, used to create.

So now would be a good moment for Mr. Crosby to step forward. He came into the NHL accompanied by unrealistic expectations of instant massive success (though it is not as though he has been a disappointment, exactly), and now an interloper, Mr. Ovechkin, has established himself as perhaps the bigger star. We are all waiting anxiously to see what level of the pyramid Mr. Crosby ultimately ascends to. He is clearly on a Hall of Fame track, but in the Hall of Fame, you’ve got your Mike Gartners and Bernie Federkos, and then again you have your Gretzkys and Orrs. The difference is made, young Sidney, at times like this."