BOSTON — When Drew Doughty got his first taste of best-on-best hockey, he was the youngest member of Team Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and things didn’t start so well for him.
Naturally, it was a conversation with one of the “veterans” that helped him reverse course and turn the event into a career-shifting experience.
Never mind that the player was just two years, four months and one day older than Doughty. It was the type of player who was born a veteran.
It was Sidney Crosby.
“He was young,” Doughty recalls, “but I remember after one of our first practices I was walking onto the bus and he was like, ‘Hey, come sit beside me.’ That was the first time I had a real conversation with him. He knew I was nervous as hell, and he brought me in and sat me down.”
On the surface, that’s a pretty simple anecdote. But it starts to take on more heft once you see the pattern repeat itself again and again in stories shared by Canadian players and staff who have worked with Crosby under the searing heat lamp of the national team environment.
In addition to the physical and mental gifts that made him one of the sport’s few truly generational players, the 37-year-old possesses a level of awareness and emotional intelligence that have taken him to another level entirely.
As close friend Nathan MacKinnon puts it: “I’m sure there’s a lot of successful people that no one really wants to be around, but guys just gravitate towards him. He’s got an awesome personality. He’s a great storyteller. He’s just a fun guy to be around.”
It’s no coincidence that Crosby now finds himself in position to claim a fourth consecutive best-on-best tournament victory when Canada faces Team USA in the championship game of the 4 Nations Face-Off on Thursday night.
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