Written by Adam Gretz at CBSsports.com
Sidney Crosby is on some kind of a roll for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
With his three-point effort on Saturday, in a game where he and Kris Letang carried what was basically an AHL team due to injuries to a come-from-behind 3-2 win over a first-place Florida Panthers team, he now has 46 points in 41 games after going through one of the worst stretches of his career to open the season (only three points in nine games).
His performance on Saturday, now part of a 10-game point streak, also pushed him into the top-10 in the NHL’s scoring race after he found himself outside of the top-100 just a couple of months ago.
There are a lot of reasons for the sudden change, including the strategic and player usage changes from new coach Mike Sullivan, to the fact that Crosby himself started to improve and regained the shoot-first mentality that had been slipping from his game in recent years.
Now that he is back to playing like Sidney Crosby and climbing the NHL’s scoring leaderboard, it’s worth asking: Where is he going to finish the season?
With 76 points in 56 games you have to accept that Patrick Kane (assuming he stays healthy) is going to win the NHL’s scoring title and nobody, Crosby included, is going to catch him.
But what about second? Is it really unreachable at this point?
That is where Dallas Stars forward Jamie Benn and Ottawa Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson currently sit (the latter deserves plenty of attention on its own) with 59 points in 53 games, putting them on a pace for 91 points this season. For Crosby to reach that number that he would need 42 points over the Penguins’ final 31 games of the season, an average of 1.35 per game. That is right around Crosby’s career average, and the same pace he has been going at for the better part of the past two months.
That seems … possible, even if it leaves little margin for error the rest of the way.
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