Is Sidney Crosby Still the NHL's Best Player?

The Hockey News' 2015-16 yearbook was released this week, and as usual, its rankings of the NHL’s 50 best players are drawing attention. The biggest surprise on this year’s list is Sidney Crosby, who falls from first place down to fourth.

Here’s the top five, courtesy of SwissHabs:

1. G Carey Price, Montreal Canadiens
2. C Jonathan Toews, Chicago Blackhawks
3. W Alex Ovechkin, Washington Capitals
4. C Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh Penguins
5. D Duncan Keith, Chicago Blackhawks

Is the Hockey News right? Has Crosby fallen off to the point where he’s no longer the best player, or worse, no longer one of the NHL’s three best players?

Let’s start by asking what the consensus wisdom of the men and women who cover the NHL is. The Professional Hockey Writers Association is far from a perfect entity, but its votes do a good job of reflecting how media members collectively view the game.

The following are the top five finishers for the Hart Trophy the last three seasons:

Season	First	Second	Third	Fourth	Fifth
2014-15	Price	Ovechkin	Tavares	Dubnyk	Crosby
2013-14	Crosby	Getzlaf	Giroux	Varlamov	Bergeron
2012-13	Ovechkin	Crosby	Tavares	Toews	Bobrovsky

Crosby is the only player to draw significant support in all three seasons. He was also named an NHL first-team All-Star in 2012-13 and 2013-14 and a second-team All-Star last season.

What about his peers, though? How do the players view Crosby?

Harry How/Getty Images

As it turns out, they like him better than the media does. Crosby won the Ted Lindsay Award—given to the most outstanding player as selected by the members of NHLPA—in both 2012-13 and 2013-14. We don’t have voting numbers to know how much support he received this summer, when Carey Price won it, but two out of three ain’t bad.

These are, of course, subjective totals. Just because the media and players consistently name Crosby the best player in the game doesn’t make it so.

What about scoring? Crosby’s 244 points over the last three seasons is 28 more than the second-place Ovechkin, and his 2.80 points/hour at five-on-five over that span is also the best in the game, just clear of Ryan Getzlaf's total.

Still, those numbers don’t include the postseason. Price and Ovechkin may never have won it all at the NHL level, but Toews has.

The trouble with that reasoning is that Toews plays for a complete Chicago Blackhawks team, while Crosby plays for a very good but less well-built Pittsburgh Penguins club. It’s impossible to know how each would do with the roles reversed, but we can look at individual statistics.

Player	PTS/GP	5v5 PTS/60	5v5 Chance%
Sidney Crosby	0.88	1.98	54.8%
Jonathan Toews	0.80	1.65	55.3%

Crosby has more points per game, more points per hour at five-on-five and—on a far less successful team—almost an identical ratio of scoring chances for to scoring chances against as Toews.

People tend to forget that Toews has had difficult moments in the postseason, too. The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 2013, but through the first 20 games of the playoffs, Toews had all of one goal and nine points as he suffered through a prolonged slump during which he simply couldn’t get the puck in the net.  

There’s a tendency sometimes to act as though Chicago only wins because of Toews, to forget about Duncan Keith, Patrick Kane, Brent Seabrook, Marian Hossa, Niklas Hjalmarsson and all of the rest. Toews is a brilliant player, but the Blackhawks are a truly magnificent team and it’s wrong to act like his Cup rings were anything other than group accomplishments.

Thus, on the evidence, Crosby is the best skater in the NHL, and it’s not particularly close.

Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images

That doesn’t mean he’s the best player. Price is the reigning NHL MVP, and those with a particularly “What have you done for me lately?” bent will argue that, by default, makes him the game’s best player.

Price is, of course, a great goalie and until this year was a largely underappreciated one. Interestingly, he had never been a finalist for a major award before 2014-15, however. He’d never finished higher than fourth in the Vezina Trophy or All-Star races and never finished higher than seventh in Hart voting.

It’s worth noting that the Vezina Trophy is voted on by the league’s general managers. In the eyes of the 30 men entrusted with running NHL teams, Price has never been a top-three player at his position before 2014-15.

Price has deserved better at times—notably 2013-14, when he might have been the best goalie in hockey—but he’s been nowhere near as dominant relative to his position as Crosby has been to his.

The balance of evidence says that Crosby is the NHL’s most dominant player. Even in a down year, he’s a contender for hockey’s highest individual honor, and in a good year, there isn’t anybody who can touch him. With all due respect to the other great players in the vicinity of the conversation, Crosby is the game’s most impressive talent.

Statistics courtesy of Hockey-Reference.com and War-on-Ice.com.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.