from Sidney Crosby at Sports Illustrated,

I can’t say there weren’t some doubts starting to creep in.

When you’re in your late 20s with 10 NHL seasons on your legs, and suddenly you’re not scoring and your team isn’t winning, the little voice inside your head can tell you things you don’t want to hear. That was the voice that started talking to me in December.

And my lack of production on the ice made it feel like the voice had a point.

Almost a quarter of the way through the 2015–16 season, I only had a handful of points and wherever I was on the list of NHL scoring leaders, it wasn’t high. I wasn’t playing up to my expectations, but even worse, my failures meant that the team wasn’t winning. Nothing we did seemed to work. Offensively we struggled and with each frustrating loss, we fell further and further behind the competition.

Forget being in the conversation as Stanley Cup favorites, we weren’t even in position to qualify for the postseason. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with doubts, either.

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