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\n fter all this time, Sidney Crosby still seems to be something of an enigma. He\u2019s been so dominant, so excellent, so stoic, for so long, it can be difficult to see the man beneath the myth. For certain generations, he simply is the game \u2014\u00a0as foundational to hockey as white ice lined blue and red. He\u2019s history incarnate.<\/p>\n
But Kris Letang knows the man. He\u2019s been there from the beginning, witnessed every step of the journey in Pittsburgh, and might understand No. 87 better than anyone who\u2019s ever skated alongside him. When the defender considers who Crosby is, truly,\u00a0he thinks back to their run to the Stanley Cup summit in the spring of 2016, of all the captain did behind the scenes, away from the cameras, to get them there.<\/p>\n
It had taken seven years for the Penguins to claw their way back to the mountaintop. After a five-game first-round battle with the rival New York Rangers, they\u2019d navigated a hard-fought six-game series with the Washington Capitals, led by No. 87\u2019s old foe, Alex Ovechkin. More than a few times, it nearly went sideways. But Crosby kept them pointed forward, kept his hands on the tiller.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the bench, he has a calming effect; on the ice, also. Between periods, between games, he\u2019s trying to understand everybody\u2019s needs,\u201d Letang says. \u201cYou know, everybody is different. It\u2019s always hard to know what a team needs, because there\u2019s so many individuals. But Sid will sit down and try to understand those things and make the right decisions for his teammates. He\u2019ll sit down with different guys at different moments, if they\u2019re not having a good series or a good game, and he\u2019ll work with those guys.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fter all this time, Sidney Crosby still seems to be something of an enigma. He\u2019s been so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-468682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}