Sidney Crosby’s Climb To Top Of Penguins’ Points List Is Reminder Of Mario Lemieux’s Greatness

The very fact of Mario Lemieux’s arrival at PPG Paints Arena this week for the Penguins’ game against the Oilers is evidence that what’s transpiring with his favorite NHL team is more than just regular-season hockey.

He attended the final three games of the Penguins’ recent — and unfortunately disastrous — home stand, there primarily to be on site when the great Sidney Crosby passes him as the Penguins’ career points leader.

The very best element of this occasion is its conveyance of the opportunity to celebrate, loud and long, the career Crosby has gifted to Pittsburgh. It’s feeling unlikely there’ll be another Stanley Cup parade within the boundaries of his career, and should he return from Milan in a few months with another gold medal, well, the passion in this region for Canadian achievement seems limited to periodic shipments from Molson.

Crosby’s 1,724th point will push him beyond Lemieux in an essential statistical category, one of the defining elements of hockey excellence: goals and assists, combined. That’s where the games are won, and money is made.

Crosby’s scoring total already ranks him among the top 10 in league history, mighty impressive given that six of the eight still standing ahead of him range from well ahead of him in games played (Jaromir Jagr, Mark Messier) to positively dwarfing his participation to date (Gordie Howe).

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Of the two who’ve played fewer games, one is Marcel Dionne, who played 1,348 games between 1971 and 1989 for primarily the Kings, as well as the Rangers and Red Wings. The other is Lemieux.

And this is why it’s hard to focus entirely on Sidney’s greatness in this circumstance.

Statistical milestones such as this can mean many different things, most frequently an acknowledgment someone has come along in a sport even greater than the best. LeBron James surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s career scoring leader was like that. So was Pitt’s Tony Dorsett setting the NCAA career rushing record in 1976, to bring it even closer to home.

Not even Crosby is likely to believe that’s the case here.

Lemieux played just 915 NHL games. Of the other top 30 scorers on the league’s career list, every one played at least 273 more games than Mario. Had Lemieux scored at his career average and been able to match the career games total of even the least busy player in that group, Dale Hawerchuk, he would stand at more than 2,200 points, putting him behind only Wayne Gretzky.

Had that been possible, we wouldn’t be having this conversation for another five years, if ever. Sid would be 43 then. No one who’s seen him play this season would suggest that is beyond him, but neither has he indicated an interest in continuing so long.

This is serving as a reminder of the dreadful obstacles that stood between Lemieux and numbers only Gretzky even could ponder. The Lemieux statue out front of PPG does not carry an asterisk; it does not need one. In the too-short time he was available to the Penguins, he built a mountain of achievement: two Stanley Cups, six Art Ross trophies for winning the scoring title, three Hart trophies for MVP. There could have been so much more, though.

He missed two months of the 1992-93 season, when the Penguins were two-time reigning champions and he’d been on pace to challenge Gretzky’s single-season records for goals (92) and points (215), to be treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He missed all but 22 games of the following season because of a back injury that ultimately required surgery. He sat out all of 1994-95 to deal with exhaustion caused by the cancer treatments. He retired after 1997.

He returned twice afterward, but only once did he play close to a full season: 67 games in 2002-03, with 28 goals and 63 assists for 91 points that ranked eighth in the league. Every guy ahead of him appeared in at least eight more games.

What could Penguins hockey have been back then with 20 straight years of a healthy Mario Lemieux? It can be argued it would not be what it is today, in the sense his temporary retirement might have given him the time to concentrate on the vast amount of deferred money owed to him and the logic of leveraging that to essentially buy the team out of bankruptcy.

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The ownership of Lemieux and Ron Burkle hired the staff that drafted Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin and Crosby, stole Kris Letang in the third round and ultimately assured the necessary home would be constructed to replace the Civic Arena and keep the team in the city — all of which led to three more Stanley Cup victories.

All that’s a bit too logical for this discussion, though.

It’s about what Mario could have been, and what Sid is, and how incredibly blessed Pittsburgh has been to dress both of them in black-and-gold jerseys.

That Lemieux could have concocted a greater career does not dim the brilliance of Crosby’s. Sid has been the greatest individual winning force to call this city home, beyond Franco Harris or Roberto Clemente or Ben Roethlisberger or, yeah, even Mario Lemieux.

We can count up Crosby’s Stanley Cups (three) and Olympic golds (two), his World Championship, World Cup of Hockey and 4 Nations Face-off titles. But the exercise reminds us: Crosby’s excellence is not defined by the statistics he can attain, just as Lemieux’s legend is not limited by the degree to which his were limited.