Sidney Crosby knows he won’t play hockey forever. On the eve of his 22nd season, it’s hard to tell

PITTSBURGH (AP) — It is the next-to-last day of September on the eve of Sidney Crosby’s 22nd season. His team’s opener across the state in Philadelphia less than 36 hours away looms.

And there the longtime Pittsburgh Penguins captain is on a random early fall Tuesday, doing what he has always done: grinding through an hour-long practice with an intensity that shows no signs of waning as the player who arrived in the NHL as a teenage prodigy closes in on his 40th birthday.

Watch Crosby stand in front of the net and deftly deflect a point shot past rookie goaltender Sergei Murashov, who was still in diapers in his native Russia when Crosby made his NHL debut on Oct. 5, 2005. Watch Crosby fail to connect the dots on a pass on one end of the ice, then backcheck furiously before slapping his stick into the end boards in frustration.

Watch the NHL’s seventh all-time leading scorer (soon to be in the top five) glide from the half wall to the front of the net and back again during a power play drill, the instincts that have carried him from franchise savior to Olympic gold medalist to three-time Stanley Cup champion taking over as he searches for an opportunity.

Practice breaks up. Some of Crosby’s younger teammates head to the dressing room. Crosby does not. He remains on the ice for another 20-plus minutes with longtime teammates Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, chasing the finer points of a sport that has long doubled as an obsession.

Crosby’s approach to his job is uncommon

Penguins coach Dan Muse heard about the trio’s relentless drive when he took over in the summer of 2025. He wasn’t skeptical, exactly, but seeing it up close gave him a different perspective.

“Sometimes I (was) surprised last year,” Muse said. “Now I guess I’m not as surprised at how long they’re out there for. … I think for everybody who’s seeing it too, like I said, it’s not necessarily the normal.”

No, it’s not.

And while Malkin and Letang have carved out their own unique places in NHL history during the trio’s two decades together, it is Crosby who has always shouldered the load of outsized expectations that have followed him from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia to Pittsburgh to, one day, the Hall of Fame.

It can be a lot. It already has been a lot. Yet Crosby has rarely let the burden show. Maybe because he’s used to it. Or maybe because he doesn’t really view it as a burden at all. Ask Crosby why he is still pushing himself at this pace, and he shrugs.

“I just love the game,” Crosby said.

And not just when the lights come on and thousands of fans — many of them usually wearing some iteration of Crosby’s jersey — come out to watch him do Sidney Crosby things. He is only player in NHL history to average a point a game for 21 straight seasons.

“I think, you know, there’s the journey or the preparation that goes into it,” he said.

It’s why Crosby arrived at the team’s practice facility weeks ahead of training camp. It’s why he still seeks opportunities to compete internationally. Sure, he could have taken the summer off after Pittsburgh’s surprising season ended with a loss to Philadelphia in the first round of the playoffs.

That’s just not the way Crosby is wired. A few weeks after the postseason exit, he served as an alternate captain to 19-year-old San Jose Sharks sensation Macklin Celebrini for Team Canada at the 2026 World Championships. This after his hope for a second Olympic gold ended with an injury at the 2026 Cortina Winter Games.

It’s a lot of hockey for anyone. Let alone someone who has been on “go” practically from the first time he pulled on skates.

Crosby wants to keep playing, but for how long he’s not sure

And yet Crosby remains as passionate about all that goes into it now as he did when he was flinging pucks into an empty dryer in the basement of his childhood home.

“Ultimately, you just, every night you step on the ice, you’re trying to win a hockey game,” he said. “That’s something that’s still there. I think it provides a lot of fire to everything for me.”

The flames show no signs of subsiding even while some of his contemporaries — Malkin and Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals chief among them — seem to have the number of games ahead of them dwindling to a precious few.

The mix of nerves and excitement that accompanies every season opener is still there. Until they’re not, expect Crosby to keep right on going.

While Crosby has stressed repeatedly that he wants to keep playing indefinitely, when the puck drops in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, it will mark the first time in his career that he will start a season in the final year of his contract. Crosby is in no hurry to sign anything; he learned a long time ago that he needs to listen to his body above all else.

“I don’t think you ever know until you get to that point,” Crosby told reporters when delivering season tickets to select fans earlier this month. “But I’m guessing it’s your level, it’s how your body feels, it’s a combination of all those things. Overall, I feel pretty good.”

Penguins general manager Kyle Dubas and Crosby’s agent Pat Brisson have been in talks, but Dubas stressed on Monday that there isn’t any “real pressure to have it done by a certain date or anything.”

Stats are nice, but winning is all that matters

Crosby, who begins the year with 1,761 career points, 38 shy of passing Ron Francis for fifth on the all-time list, has no plans to coast to whatever the finish line looks like in hopes of piling up stats and paychecks.

When it’s mentioned that 2,000 points — a plateau only Wayne Gretzky has reached — looks doable if he plays another handful of years, Crosby shakes his head. That’s never been what this is about.

“I didn’t even know how close I was until you just gave me that stat,” he said. “So no, when you talk about motivating factors to play, I wouldn’t say that’s one of them.”

The pathologically competitive Crosby remains intent on trying to help guide the Penguins back to the giddy heights of 2016 and 2017, when they became the first club in nearly 20 years to win back-to-back championships.

The going has grown increasingly tougher over the years. Pittsburgh hasn’t advanced past the first round since 2018, though their promising run to second place in the Metropolitan Division last spring provided some tangible momentum. While Dubas plainly stated the goal this time around is to make inroads on division rival and reigning Cup champion Carolina, Crosby has no plans on looking that far ahead.

There is only the familiar rhythm of the season, with its practices and morning skates and overnight plane rides and team meals and — 84 times over the next six months, then hopefully a bit more after that — the chance to hop over the boards and lean into the fire once more.

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Will Graves, The Associated Press