Sidney Crosby and the Penguins are four wins away from winning the Stanley Cup, but another sports superstar didn’t fare too well in his first trip to the finals.(CP Images)
Sunday morning pop quiz: if someone happens to be moaning like a schoolgirl that Sidney Crosby, for instance, is a whiner, what exactly does that make whinee?
Granted, that is not a grammatically correct term - heck, it isn't even a word - but stick with me. It's for effect only.
Case in point, New York Rangers coach Tom Renney and pretty well every pro-Blueshirts' scribe in the metropolitan New York area bellyaching that Greg Louganis Crosby may have taken a dive for the team in Pittsburgh's series-opening win Friday night.
Which, even if it constitutes one a diver, would strike me as being a pretty intelligent maneuver at the same time, no?
Let's not forget, this is a league where officials reward players who drop like they've been shot every ten minutes or so. Don't blame the actor competitor for doing nothing more than taking advantage of a titanic loophole in the rulebook.
I've got an idea, and that only happens once every six or seven months. Set up a committee, and I mean pronto, to look into this unsportsmanlike flopping travesty in pro hockey.
Let's call it the Diving Board. Get it?
OK, let's not get off track here. Back to Sid. The NHL is in its most critical stretch of their year, and Crosby's team now has the first of the four necessary wins under their belts. If I'm Crosby, three more of those little babies and you can call me whatever you want, as long as I can call you on the golf course in a week or so.
Does Sidney Crosby dive? Perhaps, but he only follows the instructions in the NHL "How To Win" manual.
Get hit, fall down, go on power play, score goal, win game. Simple stuff.
While it is a matter of perception anyway, maybe the Rangers should focus less on Crosby's diving and more on protecting three-goal leads.
Crosby is far from the only offender.
And, so it seems, the only whiner.