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Sidney Crosby: an appreciation | Mike Sielski

The Penguins’ star has his team back in the Stanley Cup Finals again. It’s time Philadelphia gave its most reviled villain his due.

The Flyers' long and thus-far-futile chase after Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins dates to a stunning and sobering afternoon nine years ago, to the sight of a team president bitter over the past and a general manager pondering the future. The Penguins had just embarrassed the Flyers, 6-0, in Game 5 of the 2008 Eastern Conference Finals, finishing them off to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals, and in the bowels of the building then called Mellon Arena, Peter Luukko and Paul Holmgren were coming to terms with what the Flyers had to do to catch up to Crosby & Co., and how difficult that pursuit would be.

"They have two of the best forwards in the world," Holmgren said then, referring to Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. "We knew going into this series they were going to be hard to beat. When you lose four games to one, it sort of emphasizes that point."

The Penguins have spent the better part of a decade driving home that same point. On Thursday night, when he collected a loose puck near the Ottawa Senators' net, slowed the action to a standstill, and feathered a drop pass to Chris Kunitz for a Game 7 double-overtime goal, Crosby helped send the Penguins to their fourth Finals appearance in 10 years. He already has won as many championships over that period, two, as the Flyers have in their 50 years of existence. And if Crosby, ever since his NHL debut in 2005, has always been regarded here less as a respected competitor and more as the most reviled villain in Philadelphia sports, it's long past time for him to receive credit for his greatness.

He is the consummate example of an athlete whom Philadelphia fans hate because they recognize, if they are being honest with themselves, that they would love him in equal measure if he were theirs. He has all the requisite qualities: the affection for agitation, the willingness to tread on that fine line between intense competitiveness and bona fide dirty play, the toughness - maybe the better word is recklessness - to keep returning to the lineup despite missing close to 120 games in his career because of concussion-related problems. That disregard of the long-term effects on his brain and his life might cost Crosby in his years to come, and it tinges each of his achievements with uncomfortable questions about his own good sense and the macho code in a brutal sport. But make no mistake: It increases the respect for him around the NHL, and it would make him a god here.

"He's amazing," said former NHL goaltender Kevin Weekes, who analyzes the league for the NHL Network. "The thing with Sid is he wants to be great every night. For as skilled as he is, it's his willingness every night to compete, to battle. As much as those things are inherent for any player in the league, for him it's at a different level. It's like wanting to be Michael Jordan every time on the floor. The greats have that."

The Jordan comparison is good, but there's a better one in a Crosby contemporary. Earlier this month at the NBA draft lottery, Joel Embiid suggested that the 76ers would be reaching their prime just as LeBron James was about to begin his decline, facilitating their rise to the top of the Eastern Conference. No single hockey player could possibly have the same outsized impact on his team that James has had on his, but Crosby has come about as close as one could. His presence, in part, compelled the Flyers to trade for Chris Pronger in 2009, to take the chance that a 35-year-old franchise defenseman had enough left to neutralize the Penguins' star forwards. And Crosby has reduced his primary individual foil, the Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin, to the Carmelo Anthony of the NHL, a spectacular scorer who never does enough to lift his team to postseason success because, it seems, he never quite understands and accepts the sacrifices that it would require of him.

"You ask anybody in Pittsburgh - they never worry about that with Sid," Weekes said. "Whatever it is, whatever the one-on-one battle, you know you're getting a max effort and max attention to detail with Sidney Crosby. You can't put a price on that. Sometimes that supersedes your skill set. Sometimes it complements it."

From that first postseason series against Crosby, though, the Flyers' side of the rivalry has been flavored with envy, a resentment born of the notion that their unwillingness to start fresh with a full-fledged rebuilding effort made their efforts to win a Stanley Cup somehow more honorable than the Penguins'. "We never played to lose for a number of years," Luukko, then the Flyers' president, said after that Game 5 loss in 2008. "And Pittsburgh, to [its] credit, took advantage of all those picks."

The implication of Luukko's comment was that, by missing the playoffs from 2002 through 2006 and positioning themselves to draft Crosby, Malkin, and goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, among others, the Penguins had taken a shameful shortcut to excellence.

It was a cheap and convenient excuse to cover up the Flyers' own hard history: They missed the playoffs for five consecutive seasons in the early 1990s, and they mined that fallow stretch for Mike Ricci and Eric Lindros instead of Jaromir Jagr and Peter Forsberg. Such are the consequences of consequential choices. The Flyers have made and will make another succession of them now as they try to build a team capable of winning a championship. One wonders how many more Stanley Cups the game's greatest player will have hoisted over his head before they do, how long Sidney Crosby will still stand in their way.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski