from Damien Cox at the Toronto Star,

As long as veteran stars Patrick Kane, Steven Stamkos and John Tavares have played in the NHL, the Stanley Cup playoffs have included both Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin.

Or look at it this way: Gary Bettman will in the very near future surpass Clarence Campbell and become the longest serving chief executive in NHL history. For more than half the time he’s been in office he’s been able to count on having Crosby and Ovechkin involved when the second season began....

Having superstars of that calibre has meant those teams haven’t even been able to consider rebuilding, and won’t be able to do so until they retire or leave to play for another team, the latter of which seems hard to imagine in both cases.

The NHL has been dining out on the Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry for a very, very long time. It’s been compared favourably to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird period in the NBA.

Crosby and Ovechkin, in some ways, saved their respective franchises along the way, and did an awful lot to repair the damage caused by the NHL’s shutdown that obliterated the 2004-05 regular season and the ’05 Stanley Cup playoffs. The league enacted a slew of new rules coming out of that owners lockout and the two newcomers were able to flourish immediately. In the 2005-06 season, Crosby notched 102 points, and Ovechkin scored 52 goals.

That helped ignite a debate that raged for years. Which player was better? It hardly mattered in Washington, a franchise that had been an NHL afterthought for a quarter-century before general manager George McPhee authorized a tanking project that resulted in getting Ovechkin first overall in 2004.

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