Ranking the Top Stars in the 2015 NHL Playoffs Who is On the List

VIDEO: And it MAY NOT be who you Think it is… Ranking the Top Stars in the 2015 NHL Playoffs 

Here’s the top five, courtesy of SwissHabs:

1. G Carey Price, Montreal Canadiens
2. C Jonathan Toews, Chicago Blackhawks
3. W Alex Ovechkin, Washington Capitals
4. C Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh Penguins
5. D Duncan Keith, Chicago Blackhawks

Is the Hockey News right? Has Crosby fallen off to the point where he’s no longer the best player, or worse, no longer one of the NHL’s three best players?

Let’s start by asking what the consensus wisdom of the men and women who cover the NHL is. The Professional Hockey Writers Association is far from a perfect entity, but its votes do a good job of reflecting how media members collectively view the game.

The following are the top five finishers for the Hart Trophy the last three seasons:

Crosby is the only player to draw significant support in all three seasons. He was also named an NHL first-team All-Star in 2012-13 and 2013-14 and a second-team All-Star last season.

What about his peers, though? How do the players view Crosby?

As it turns out, they like him better than the media does. Crosby won the Ted Lindsay Award—given to the most outstanding player as selected by the members of NHLPA—in both 2012-13 and 2013-14. We don’t have voting numbers to know how much support he received this summer, when Carey Price won it, but two out of three ain’t bad.

These are, of course, subjective totals. Just because the media and players consistently name Crosby the best player in the game doesn’t make it so.

What about scoring? Crosby’s 244 points over the last three seasons is 28 more than the second-place Ovechkin, and his 2.80 points/hour at five-on-five over that span is also the best in the game, just clear of Ryan Getzlaf’s total.

Still, those numbers don’t include the postseason. Price and Ovechkin may never have won it all at the NHL level, but Toews has.

The trouble with that reasoning is that Toews plays for a complete Chicago Blackhawks team, while Crosby plays for a very good but less well-built Pittsburgh Penguins club. It’s impossible to know how each would do with the roles reversed, but we can look at individual statistics.

VIDEO: And it MAY NOT be who you Think it is… Ranking the Top Stars in the 2015 NHL Playoffs 

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2425472-ranking-the-top-stars-in-the-2015-nhl-playoffs

Is Sidney Crosby Still the NHL's Best Player?