#Sid's 1200th game

[icedbatik]

Reilly passed the helmet to Sid on his 1,200th NHL game played.

[jackhues]

NUMBER 1200 - (b's version)

NOTE: this takes place NOV/04/23 -- pens vs sharks, pre-game

buttercup's world! au masterlist (dad!sidney crosby)

buttercupsworld:

liked by _connorbedard, calemakar_, thombordeleau_ & others

buttercupsworld: from your first game, to your first stanley cup, to the olympics, and all the other milestones along the way -- you've finally made it to game number 1200. thank you for making time for me and being the best dad possible in every way! i love you, and i'm always cheering for you 🖤💛

mackinnon29: i was about to comment smth funny bcz of the pics, but then the caption was so sweet -> buttercupsworld: do it anyways

mackinnon29: i'm literally tearing up rn -> buttercupsworld: baby 👶

calemakar_: the caption and the post have two completely different vibes

e.malkin71geno: he saw this and he cried -> buttercupsworld: i know, i recorded it

erikkarlson65: OH CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN

penguins: baby sid, baby sid with his baby, not-so-baby sid's not-so-baby celebrating his 1200th game -- we're not okay

[itsnotgray]

ALSO WHO WAS GONNA TELL ME TODAY IS SID’S 1200TH GAME??

[hockeymuffins]

Sidney Crosby, the hockey anti-toaster

"He's very in-tune with what's going on in the room, more so than anybody I've ever played with," said Matt Cullen, who has played with hundreds of teammates over 21 years in the NHL.

"He has a unique ability to sense when the team needs a spark," Cullen continued. "He has such a feel for what this team needs. He seems to sense when the time is right for him to put the team on his back. And he does. And he has that ability."

x

Okay listen. I get where the initial concept of Sid as this hockey playing robot who didn’t know how to interact with or understand normal people came from. He came into the league at a very young age, absurdly dedicated even by the standards of professional athlete media training to saying the right things and not making waves and focusing on personal effort over individual achievements above all else. We still saw some of that last night, when he deflected praise for scoring his 1200th point by highlighting Cullen’s 1500th game. And let’s not mince words: he was not a cool 18 year old! He was literally as young as a rookie could possibly be, and he had been the youngest on every team he had been on for a decade at that point, and he had the appearance and demeanor of so many young prodigies and kids who skip levels in schooling or whatnot and end up pretending to be an adult when everyone can see you’re still just a kid who happens to be able to compete with (and beat) adults. He was a dweeb who could also outplay basically every player on the ice.  

And instead of doing what a lot of kids in that situation do--attempt to act older than their age by insisting they can be on their own and usually fucking it up--he lived with Mario for years. He declined to wear the C until he felt in his own judgment of himself--not his team’s judgment, but his own--that he was ready to take on that responsibility. He knew he was young, and he knew he had to earn his place as a leader on his team, and he knew that being a leader would look different for him at that point than it did for Mario before he retired. I don’t think that Sid is the same kind of captain now that he was in 2009. But I also don’t think that Sid suddenly learned how to communicate with humans sometime in the past ten years. I just think that how he was able to be a leader shifted over time as the room around him changed.   

When we look at him now, though, it’s hard for me to imagine that he was ever perceived as being bad in the room, or uncertain of his place, because he is so incredibly at ease with his team and his role within it. And that perception of him as a robot who doesn’t understand people is so deeply at odds with the way his teammates talk about him and also interact with him on camera. One of the things Sid has certainly not changed much since his rookie year is how tightly he compartmentalizes himself--there is how he speaks with the media and presents himself publicly, and there is how he is on the bench and on the ice and in the room and at team events with the guys, and they are very different. (And then there’s his actual private life, which we know incredibly little about.) He doesn’t even give us the curated version of his private life the way many players do via their social media, so everything we see is either the direct, professional, public-facing version of him, or it’s the glimpses we see of him actually doing his job of playing hockey and the team-approved footage released on their social media. But everything that his teammates say about him, and how comfortable they are at poking fun at him and the way he laughs and blushes in response, and every time a new player joins the team and says a variation of, “I thought I understood how great he is but I had no idea,” drives home that this image of Sid as this hockey-playing machine, who doesn’t understand how human emotions work, is just deeply, deeply wrong. There’s a difference between being socially awkward and simply not being a performer, and in my view Sid is the latter and not the former. He’s intuitive and communicative and he thinks really hard about how to make an entire team better, from on ice systems and set plays to making sure new guys feel comfortable in Pittsburgh and in the organization. He is much more outward-focused than he gets credit for, in a good way. 

tl;dr there is a difference between having a tightly controlled public-facing image with very strict privacy boundaries and being a personality-less robot who doesn’t know how to communicate with humans or understand his teammates, and Sidney Crosby is the first and not the second, Matt Cullen says so, I REST MY CASE. 

[jackhues]

be on the lookout for a sid and bee 1200th game ig edit!!