This point is one of the most salient to me, and I've never really been able to get it out of my head when watching McDavid's career unfold. It's not as if playing with Draisaitl is just some trivial, harmless difference in deployment that benefits his production with no real trade-off; we've seen, time and time again, this strategy come to bite them in the playoffs. IMHO, it's the reason why they lost against Florida. They were utterly gassed in that final game - some would applaud them for giving it everything they had, but that's the same individualist mindset that both praises their gaudy point totals, and unreasonably expects and asks them to win on their own.
I think the reason the Oilers generally seem to be so ineffective with spreading talent through their lineup is because of a lack of commitment to that approach. Expectations are set early on and throughout a season, and throughout McDavid's career, the expectation set is always one of "if the rest of you guys cant produce, we'll just spend the 3rd period playing McDavid and Draisaitl for 50% of it to bail us out, so don't worry about it. This is a very "give a man a fish" mode of leadership - if you f*** up, I'll take over and handle it.
In my experience, this is not a particularly effective long-term strategy for team-building and performance. The rest of the team gets complacent, and the guy they overly-rely upon gets burnt out and beat up - in hockey terms, that means exhausted or injured. When guys feel like excellence is demanded of them, and they have to rise to the occassion to live up to the standard set by Crosby and Malkin if they want the team to win next time they step on the ice, what you see is the superior depth-scoring performance that Pittsburgh has had that Edmonton lacks.
What Crosby - and Malkin - did, was not just to "make their teammates better" in terms of applied stats and on-ice play with them on their wing: what Crosby in particular was instrumental in doing was setting the cultural expectation and attitude that Pittsburgh was a team that had to win like a team. Everything from his otherworldly offseason training and conditioning, his on-ice and in-locker room leadership, and, especially - his performance as an exceptional player, clearly communicated to every single player on the roster what was expected of them and what was demanded of them in order to win.
If you want a reson for Pittsburgh being, indisputably, the most consistent team at winning and making the playoffs over the era, despite their massive generational turnover in roster personnel (including between cups nearly a decade apart), this is it. It's San Antonio Spurs-esque. The Spurs never had the most consistently dominant individual scoring, and that's not because guys like Duncan were incapable of being individually dominant. It's not even necessarily because they "traded offense for defense" in some transactional way. It's because players like Duncan and Crosby have routinely passed up opportunities to score more. At any time, they could have shoved the absolute best linemates (in this case, Malkin etc.) onto Crosby's wing and saw his production skyrocket. They didn't, and even then, his on-ice impact was generational.
Winning is a habit that is produced through every single facet of organizational competence. Crosby started winning his cups not in the playoffs, but in the offseason. This is why his peers appraise him as one of the greatest players and leaders of all time, why GMs would line-up to draft him 1OA if given the choice over comparable players, and why hes won as much as he has. Sure, the rest of Pittsburgh as an organization had a big part in it, too - and no one can argue that Edmonton has been a shining star of organizational competence during McDavid's tenure, even when the team was winning. But Crosby was the one that set the tone and the one that translated that organizational competence into Stanley Cups.
how is that a strange question, yet “most complete” makes perfect sense.
