The better career: Crosby or Ovechkin?

  • We sincerely apologize for the extended downtime. Our hosting provider, XenForo Cloud, encountered a major issue with their backup system, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of some critical data from the past year.

    What This Means for You:

    • If you created an account after March 2024, it no longer exists. You will need to sign up again to access the forum.
    • If you registered before March 2024 but changed your email, username, or password in the past year, those changes were lost. You’ll need to update your account details manually once you're logged in.
    • Threads and posts created within the last year have been restored.

    Our team is working with Xenforo Cloud to recover data using backups, sitemaps, and other available resources. We know this is frustrating, and we deeply regret the impact on our community. We are taking steps with Xenforo Cloud to ensure this never happens again. This is work in progress. Thank you for your patience and support as we work through this.

    In the meantime, feel free to join our Discord Server

When it's all said and done, who will go down as having the better career?

  • Sid

    Votes: 100 73.5%
  • Ovy

    Votes: 18 13.2%
  • Dead even

    Votes: 11 8.1%
  • Can't decide

    Votes: 7 5.1%

  • Total voters
    136
they're even.
Crosby has the team accomplishments (more cups, gold medals) but Ovi will finish with the most important record in the sport, most goals all time. Ovi also has more MVPs.

Most important record is most points, hence why Art Ross is generally more valued than Rocket. Otherwise I agree.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jigglysquishy
Reasonably equivalent players who were each the best player in the world for a few years. There’s no strict measurement for this sort of thing so I don’t begrudge anyone for their choice, though I think most here will weigh team accomplishments as sufficient to justify setting the individual players apart
 
  • Like
Reactions: Summer Rose
they're even.
Crosby has the team accomplishments (more cups, gold medals) but Ovi will finish with the most important record in the sport, most goals all time. Ovi also has more MVPs.
Ironically the record chase kinda shows exactly why this is Crosby well over Ovechkin. Gretzky isn’t the best to ever do it because he has the most goals all time. Gretzky was first and foremost a playmaker, and what makes him the best are things like him having more career assists than anyone has points, or being the 1st and 2nd fastest player to 1000 points. Nobody thinks back on Gretzky and thinks “he was as good as he was because of the goal scoring”. Ovechkin will take the goals record, but everything else Crosby did and accomplished are far greater.

Think the current NHL, who would you rather have: Draisaitl, Pastrnak, Matthews or McDavid, Mackinnon and Kucherov? The best goal scorers usually offer less value in comparison to the most productive players.
 
2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2022

If you want to add "had a better season even if Crosby was the better player", tack on 2011, 2012, 2013

I don’t recall Ovechkin being considered the best player after 2010, let alone as late as 2020 🧐
 
The thing that strikes me most about Crosby advocates is that they clearly place an enormous amount of value on team success, which Crosby has had in spades. However, all of that team success was front-loaded into the early part of his career, and they pay little attention to the fact that Crosby's team has won exactly 1 playoff series since he turned 30 prior to the 17-18 season. If anybody had stated after Crosby's age 29 season, when he'd played 148 playoff games, that he still wouldn't have 200 playoff games played at age 37, they'd have been laughed out of the thread. Crosby's played 32 playoff games in the following 8 seasons, despite being healthy enough to play about 92% of Pittsburgh's games in that time period. Mario Lemieux, who initially retired before his age-32 season, actually has played more playoff games after turning 30 than Crosby so far, playing in 41 games (and winning 4 series).

The other aspect of team success is regular season results, and again Crosby's career is a bit disappointing. His team never won the President's Trophy, finished 1st in his Conference once (and that in a shortened season), and won 4 or 5 division titles, depending on tiebreakers. To be fair to Crosby, he does have 6 second place finishes in Conference, though none since 2016-17 (again, before he turned 30).
 
The thing that strikes me most about Crosby advocates is that they clearly place an enormous amount of value on team success, which Crosby has had in spades. However, all of that team success was front-loaded into the early part of his career, and they pay little attention to the fact that Crosby's team has won exactly 1 playoff series since he turned 30 prior to the 17-18 season. If anybody had stated after Crosby's age 29 season, when he'd played 148 playoff games, that he still wouldn't have 200 playoff games played at age 37, they'd have been laughed out of the thread. Crosby's played 32 playoff games in the following 8 seasons, despite being healthy enough to play about 92% of Pittsburgh's games in that time period. Mario Lemieux, who initially retired before his age-32 season, actually has played more playoff games after turning 30 than Crosby so far, playing in 41 games (and winning 4 series).

The other aspect of team success is regular season results, and again Crosby's career is a bit disappointing. His team never won the President's Trophy, finished 1st in his Conference once (and that in a shortened season), and won 4 or 5 division titles, depending on tiebreakers. To be fair to Crosby, he does have 6 second place finishes in Conference, though none since 2016-17 (again, before he turned 30).

Yes, he should have waited like OV to win his ONE Cup in his 30s and also added multiple empty President's Cup trophies to his resume.

Clearly it's OV > Crosby.

And that's just the NHL. It becomes more clear when you add in Crosby's Two Gold Medals, a World Cup and a Four Nations Cup. Crosby really dropped the ball there.
 
And that's just the NHL. It becomes more clear when you add in Crosby's Two Gold Medals, a World Cup and a Four Nations Cup. Crosby really dropped the ball there.
If anything, that makes my argument stronger - both Golds were prior to 30, World Cup was age-29. The Four Nations tournament is an exercise in deciding which games matter. Crosby had 5 points against Sweden and Finland, and 0 points against the US. The Canadians scored 4 goals against the US in 2 games, and Crosby was on-ice for 1 of them. The US scored 5 goals against Canada, and Crosby was on-ice for 3 of them (1 empty net). What matters more, the fact that Canada won the final, or Crosby's on-ice results?

I'm not even sure I agree with the position you think I'm advocating. It is close either way, which I think is the source of more complaints in this argument. If I may be so bold to generalize the arguments, the Ovechkin side tends to fall along the lines of 'a case for either to be ahead, Crosby by a slight bit if he is', whereas the Crosby side is more 'Crosby's ahead, it isn't that close'.
 
Yes, he should have waited like OV to win his ONE Cup in his 30s and also added multiple empty President's Cup trophies to his resume.

Clearly it's OV > Crosby.

And that's just the NHL. It becomes more clear when you add in Crosby's Two Gold Medals, a World Cup and a Four Nations Cup. Crosby really dropped the ball there.
I think with Crosby, he has demonstrated team success very few NHlers in history could match. In terms of individual awards however, Crosby only has one Art Ross over Ovechkin and one more Smythe and that’s it. I know injuries got in the way, but winning the Art/Hart in 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 which was very possible, would have given him the individual accolades more in line with other top 10 players all time. Besides, all those Rockets must hold some value, right?.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Crow
If anything, that makes my argument stronger - both Golds were prior to 30, World Cup was age-29. The Four Nations tournament is an exercise in deciding which games matter. Crosby had 5 points against Sweden and Finland, and 0 points against the US. The Canadians scored 4 goals against the US in 2 games, and Crosby was on-ice for 1 of them. The US scored 5 goals against Canada, and Crosby was on-ice for 3 of them (1 empty net). What matters more, the fact that Canada won the final, or Crosby's on-ice results?

Your argument seems to be that the things that puts Crosby ahead of Ovechkin all-time happened too early in his career. As strange as that sounds, let's talk it through.

Guess how many Cups the members of the Big 4 won after the age of 27? The answer rhymes with the a legendary Flyers coach.
 
I think with Crosby, he has demonstrated team success very few NHlers in history could match. In terms of individual awards however, Crosby only has one Art Ross over Ovechkin and one more Smythe and that’s it. I know injuries got in the way, but winning the Art/Hart in 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 which was very possible, would have given him the individual accolades more in line with other top 10 players all time. Besides, all those Rockets must hold some value, right?.

And Crosby's Top 3 Art Ross/Hart nominations, an amount only bettered by members of the Big 4, must hold some value too.
 
The thing that will put Crosby ahead of Ovi in the long-term rankings is team and international success. Ovi's teams have 1 cup and 0 international awards, and when you dig even further (namely with the Capitals not even making it beyond round 2 in all but 1 of Ovi's seasons), his team and international success is severely lacking.

Crosby has 3 cups, 4 cup appearances, 2 gold medals and the Olympic golden goal on his resume. Even if you want to argue that individual stats and awards have Ovi ahead (which I think would be contested), Crosby's team and international success blows Ovi's out of the water and will be the primary reason why he's viewed as having the better career in the long run.
 
Last edited:
Voted even for me personally because I appreciate the f*** out of the style Ovi played.

Sid is the perfect player so no flaw in picking him, but Ovechkin was the more fun player, has arguably the better individual trophy case and will take down a once thought to be impossible record.

If you're building a team, you take Sid, but if you're just a fan of Hockey you take Ovi.
 
  • Like
Reactions: shakes the clown
The thing that will put Crosby ahead of Ovi in the long-term rankings is team and international success. Ovi's teams have 1 cup and 0 international awards, and when you dig even further (namely with the Capitals not even making it beyond round 2 in all but 1 of Ovi's seasons), his team and international success is severely lacking.

Crosby has 3 cups, 4 cup appearances, 2 gold medals and the Olympic golden goal on his resume. Even if you want to argue that individual stats and awards have Ovi ahead (which I think would be contested), Crosby's team and international success blows Ovi's out of the water and will be the primary reason why he's viewed as having the better career in the long run.

I think beyond this the main thing Crosby has in his favour is simply being a better player for longer. I can’t really take anyone serious who says Ovechkin has been better than Crosby outside of 2007-10, which is remarkable when you consider he’s turned himself into the unanimous greatest goal scorer of all-time since then.
 

Ad

Ad