Nothing happened Wednesday night worth arguing about. Crosby being a nightmare at the faceoff dot is his job. He's done it the same brutal way for two decades.
Start with what the outrage skips. There's no verified clip of Crosby doing something to Macklin Celebrini at center ice that rises above standard, legal, officiated faceoff combat. Stick ties, hacks at the wrists, the little leg jostle, bodies leaning in before the puck drops. That's the faceoff circle. It's a contact sport inside a contact sport, and it has been since long before Celebrini was in the league.
Celebrini already told you how he feels about it. Back in his 2024-25 rookie season, after a night when Crosby won 21 of 36 faceoffs to his 5 of 12, Celebrini said of Crosby: "He was snapping them back on me on the faceoff dot, so I think we're even." Even. A young center treating a hard old pro like a hard old pro and grinning about it.
RatingThe relationship behind this makes the "veteran bully" framing look even sillier. In 2025, Celebrini worked on his faceoff technique with Crosby at a Team Canada practice, with Crosby showing him how to tie up opponents at the dot. At the 2026 World Championship, Celebrini kept the captain's C even after Crosby joined the roster, with Crosby reportedly adamant that the kid keep it. That's what mentorship looks like.
If you want the real Crosby faceoff lore, it's older and nastier than anything from Wednesday. After the 2012 playoffs, Claude Giroux had both wrists repaired and said flatly, "Those are from (Sidney) Crosby," accusing him of hacking across the wrists on every faceoff drop. Crosby never denied the contact and never apologized for it: "I really like to win the faceoff... I don't try to go after his wrists but if I caught it, I'm not sorry for it. I was trying to win a faceoff and if I caught his wrist, then I caught his wrist." Fractured wrists, surgery on both, and the league didn't suspend him. That's the ceiling of Crosby faceoff controversy, and it still ended in a shrug.
So spare me the leg-kick forensics from a grainy social clip. If someone has footage of Crosby doing something genuinely dangerous and unpenalized to Celebrini, describe it, time it, show the infraction. Nobody has. What there is instead is a routine back-and-forth between two centers who respect each other, inflated into a referendum on respect by people who needed something to post about.
That night, Pittsburgh beat San Jose 3-2 in a shootout after blowing a two-goal lead in the third, with Ben Kindel scoring in regulation and getting the only shootout goal. Celebrini scored with 8:28 left and set up Mason Marchment's tying goal with 4:11 to go, and reached 200 career points in the process, the fifth-youngest player in NHL history to get there. The only names ahead of him: Crosby, Wayne Gretzky, Jimmy Carson and Mario Lemieux. On the night everybody wanted to cast Celebrini as a victim of Crosby's roughhousing, he was busy chasing Crosby into the record books.
The one real scrum that night didn't even involve Crosby. Kaedan Korczak took exception to a hit from Celebrini, there was pushing and shoving, and officials handed Korczak four minutes for roughing and Celebrini a minor. That got broken up and penalized, like hockey does. The faceoff "controversy" got none of that treatment because there was nothing to treat.
Crosby being impossible to line up against is why he has the career he has. Treating a young star exactly that hard, with zero charity, is the most respect a player like Crosby knows how to give. The only people treating this as a confrontation needed it to be one.
