Crosby passes Dionne, and the Penguins are wasting the view
A deflected Malkin one-timer made Sidney Crosby sixth all-time in points, on a team that has won once in five.
Sidney Crosby is now sixth on the NHL's all-time points list, and the most Penguins thing about it is that the milestone was the best part of their month. The captain keeps climbing. The team under him keeps finding new floors.
The point came Saturday in Los Angeles, and it was not a work of art. Evgeni Malkin wound up for a one-timer, it clipped Crosby on the way through, and the goal that was first given to Malkin got switched to the captain.
That was point 1,772, one past Marcel Dionne. Crosby added an empty-netter later in a 5-2 win, presumably to make the record keepers' evening easier.
The number
1,773. That's where Crosby sits after Saturday, in 1,437 regular-season games, per NHL data: 660 goals and 1,113 assists. Ron Francis is fifth at 1,798, 25 points up the road.
Last season he passed Mario Lemieux and Steve Yzerman. This season it's Dionne. He has been better than a point a game in every season he's played, which is the kind of sentence that stops being impressive only because you've read it 21 times.
The part Pittsburgh would rather skip
Here's the Ferda number, and it isn't flattering. Crosby has six points in his last six games, by our count, and all six came in two of them. He was held off the sheet in the other four, including a home loss to Boston in which the Penguins gave up six.
He's at 12 points in 17 games and 19.3 minutes a night, per NHL data. For anyone else that's a fine start. For him it's the slowest stretch you'll find on his page.
That isn't a legend falling off a cliff. It's a center carrying a team that went 1-3-1 in its last five, by our count, with Saturday the only win in that run.
Pittsburgh has 14 points through 17 games, and the list keeps moving mostly because Crosby refuses to get worse at a normal, reasonable rate.
The Ferda take
The milestone deserves the applause, and the franchise deserves a harder question. Every season Pittsburgh spends in the middle is a season of the best player of his generation spent on a team that can't win a round.
Malkin is still here, still feeding him one-timers, and still on a team built to make the playoffs on a good night.
The front office has a choice it keeps not making. Either it spends to give Crosby one more real run, or it starts the rebuild and lets him chase Francis on a team that's honest about where it is. Hanging in between is the worst version of both.
The call
At his current rate of 12 points in 17 games, Crosby needs roughly 37 more games to pass Francis, by our math. We'll say he does it before February. He'll do it on a team that's out of a playoff spot, and nobody in Pittsburgh will be shocked by either half of that sentence.
