2025-26 Season in Review: Sidney Crosby

Vitals

Player: Sidney Crosby
Born: Aug 7, 1987
Height: 5’11”
Weight: 200 pounds
Hometown: Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada
Shoots: Left
Draft: First round pick (1st overall) in 2005 by the Penguins
2024-25 Statistics: 68 games played; 29 goals; 45 assists; 74 points; one goal and four assists in six playoff games
Contract Status: 2026-27 is the final season on Crosby’s current contract. He’s eligible to officially extend on July 1.

Story of the Season

“This is where I want to be,” Sidney Crosby said at the start of 2025 training camp. “I love it here… I talk about the first day, and you think about first impressions. I didn’t know a lot about Pittsburgh prior to being drafted, and I showed up at the airport and could barely move. The support that I felt from day one, the relationships that I formed here, the memories, the teammates, the fans. I mean, you go down the list.”

“I’m so grateful and thankful that I’ve had the opportunity to play here as long as I have. And I think anyone who knows me knows what the city means to me and how special it is.”

2025-26 was a season of affirmation between Sidney Crosby and the Penguins. The long-time captain had to endure speculation about his future like never before in the summer of 2025 (not helped by his agent saying a trade was “always a possibility”). All that external noise placed the captain at an unavoidable, awkward late-career crossroads that he never wanted to be at in the first place.

In the end, Sidney Crosby did what he always does: set aside the outside noise, get to work and help his team win. Crosby roared out the gates, scoring eight goals and 15 points in the first 12 games of the season to do his part for the 8-2-2 record that Pittsburgh jumped out to at the beginning of the season.

From there, the future took care of itself with the Pens weathering some storms of blown leads and Crosby there to help lead them along the way. By the Olympic break the Pens were second in the Metropolitan Division and fourth in the Eastern Conference via points percentage with a 29-15-12 record that had them on track for qualifying for the playoffs.

Then came the road bump in Italy. Crosby’s Olympic tournament ended with a knee injury in the quarterfinals on February 18th. He would attempt to test his leg and make the effort to see if he could play for the gold medal game on the 22nd, but the damage was too great. The Canadians ended up losing in OT, only generating one goal, providing a surreal and unexpected finish derailed in large part by the absence of their captain.

Upon coming back to the States, it was announced Crosby would miss a minimum of four weeks, a timeline he hit on the nose by returning to the lineup on March 18th, exactly four weeks after the injury was suffered. He would record a goal and an assist in his return.

Those last 26 games of the season after the Olympic break could be seen as the rest of the team holding up their end of the bargain to their veteran leader. Crosby only played in 12 of the final 26 games – scoring just two goals (while adding in 13 assists). There was a time when two goals and 15 points from Crosby over a 26-game span would spell doom. That time was not 2025-26, when players up and down the whole lineup stepped in and stepped up. The Pens still managed to lock up a playoff spot in a relatively drama-free fashion, despite a limited impact from their brightest star. They showed that this team, with major inputs from Erik Karlsson, Egor Chinakhov, Bryan Rust, Anthony Mantha and Rickard Rakell, were able to shoulder the load to deserve to make the playoffs for the first time since 2022 and silence the naysayers decrying Crosby playing out his days with a moribund franchise.

It’s a nice story from that perspective; the star player made it clear he wanted things to go better and certainly carried his end of the bargain while he could. When he couldn’t, plenty of others were there to do the rest and keep the Penguins in second place in the division – far better than preseason projections.

There was nothing nice about the postseason, however. Crosby, like many of his teammates, had a poor start to the playoffs, falling into an 0-3 hole. He rebounded have two very strong performances in Games 4+5 (producing four total points to help keep the season alive) but the Pens ultimately bowed out in Game 6.

Though things didn’t play out exactly as he would have liked, the 2025-26 season was another successful campaign for Crosby. He extended his NHL record streak of point/game seasons to 21. He passed Steve Yzerman and Mario Lemieux in career points this year, two legends and major influences of Crosby’s formative years. Passing Lemieux obviously stands out in that Crosby has taken over the all-time point record for the franchise, that crazy as it sounds, there was no absolute guarantee he would finish out his days with had the club continued to mire below the playoff picture.

Thanks to a great 2025-26 from Crosby and the Pens at large, that debate about a change will recess, possibly and thankfully for good. Sidney Crosby is where he wants to be and still a major factor in making the Penguins relevant. This past year he proved it to them, and the rest of the franchise from the players to the coaches to managers were able to reciprocate.

Monthly Splits

via Yahoo

The splits tell the story of Crosby’s red hot start in the season’s first two months, followed by a decrease in goals following his injury. The ice time was also down in March/April as the Penguins made sure their captain was right and ready for the playoffs where he was back to his usual 20+ minute per night workload.

Regular season 5v5 advanced stats

Data via Natural Stat Trick. Ranking is out of 18 forwards on the team who qualified by playing a minimum of 150 minutes.

Corsi For%: 50.2 (8th)
Goals For%: 55.2 (9th)
xGF%: 51.8 (7th)
Scoring Chance%: 49.6 (10th)
High Danger Scoring Chance%: 51.6 (12th)
5v5 on-ice shooting%: 12.0 (8th)
On-ice save%: .896 (11th)
Goals/60: 0.95
Assists/60: 1.61
Points/60: 2.56 (4th)

A good indicator of just how successful a season it was for Crosby would be to isolate the Pens’ on ice shooting percentage with him on the ice. If he and his teammates are converting, he’s done well. In the odd year when it’s been a challenge, then it’s been frustrating. This year was very good – and even better was seven other Penguin forwards enjoyed more success in this department to indicate a very strong offensive performance. Crosby managing to finish above a 2.5 P/60 in his first line center role at age-38 is yet another feather in his cap as one of the top offensive players of all time.

Charts n’at

Via Advanced Hockey Stats and NHL Edge

Sidney Crosby: still very good at hockey! WAR has detected no fall off in his game as Crosby advances deep into his late 30’s. His style and ways are different from his athletic peak earlier in the career, but the results are still better than just about everyone when it comes to generating offense.

You’d expect good things from the microstats, and as usual Crosby never disappoints. He’s still elite as an in-zone offensive weapon with the familiar tenets of his game to create a ton of chances for his teammates while also scoring plenty of goals for himself. Zone entry struggles are the only indicator of a player that doesn’t have quite the same number of tools available that he once did.

There’s aging well, and then there’s this look above. Crosby’s production today is basically the same as it has been since 2014 when the Mike Johnston era helped to usher him out of his pure peak days from 2005-13. The highs aren’t quite as high recently as they were in the 2019-22 period, but considering Crosby is pushing 40 his rates of production remain incredibly impressive, and just as consistent as we all have come to know over the past 21 years as the absolute trademark of Crosby’s game. If his career has taught anything it’s that he’s always going to be very good, and somehow he’s never going to be anything else.

Crosby gets around the ice well and is one of the big influences in the modern game for taking harsh angle shots, but he knows at this stage that a nose for the net is where goals are going to come from. Zone starts being friendly for offense set him up for success and then he continues the territorial domination in a major way to play a lot in the offensive zone and avoid as much time as possible being in his own end of the rink.

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Interestingly, as seen above in the advanced stats, the Pens’ first line was more selective in the amount of shots (be it by design or inability to produce a large quantity). That plus the zone entries likely influenced the decision to get Egor Chinakhov up to the first line. It’s not that playing with Rickard Rakell and ol’ trusty Bryan Rust doesn’t work, but given the ages of all three there is a need for some young blood and fresh skill on the Pens’ first line. That will be interesting to track moving forward to see if Pittsburgh keeps working to develop a Chinakhov-Crosby connection or reverts back to the known quantity of playing with veterans.

The chart of where goals were scored this season shows a player still willing and able to work into the high danger areas and then convert once there. An underrated talking point with Crosby is how his scoring touch has provided an ability to remain a 30-40 goal scorer this late in his career. That adds such an impressive element in his massive portfolio of hockey success. For someone known for his playmaking abilities, it’s actually his high rate of goals that deserves a lot of the credit for his late-career sustainment of being one of the world’s best. I’m not sure we would have really expected that to be the case 10 or 20 years ago for how just his game would evolve at this point.

Overall, Crosby’s wheels are more than fine at his advanced age. This data looks better on the page than it might on the ice, eight of the nine 22+ bursts came in calendar 2025 (the ninth was in January). Despite his best efforts, the aging process is going to drain him as the long grind of a season goes along. Then obviously a knee injury isn’t going to help the cause. Father Time will always be undefeated but Crosby can still more than hang with the players in the league when it comes to getting from Point A to Point B, despite being one of the oldest players now. His burst isn’t as dynamic as it once was to skate through the defense successfully on any given shift like when he was a young player, but he remains a very strong skater overall with very nice burst ability.

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Highlights

Questions to ponder

The timing of his decision for when Crosby wants to extend his contract in Pittsburgh is the biggest Sid-centric question of this offseason. By all accounts, Crosby’s desire to play is not slowing down, but his next contract for 2027-28 would commit him to playing as a 40-year old. Until he puts pen to paper and signs on for 2027-28, the whole future direction of the Pens could be considered up in the air since a much different path forward would take effect depending on whether Crosby plays or not.

Crosby signed his last contract just before camp in September 2024, will he do something similar so that the inevitable questions about potential retirement don’t get brought up every day in every city? That’s not a topic he will want lingering or to address regularly, yet it certainly won’t go away easily either without resolution. It really doesn’t seem like this upcoming year will be his final season, but at the same time he’s more than earned the right not to be in a hurry. Crosby’s always said he needs to find out the information from his body to dictate decisions about the future, that info can only be learned in due time. The timing will be what everyone is watching out for going into 2026-27.

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Ideal 2026-27

At this point Crosby’s chasing legends, he currently is seventh place in all-time NHL scoring (1761). He is 89 points away from Gordie Howe in fourth and will be hunting down Marcel Dionne (1771) and Ron Francis (1798) next year. Always team-oriented, Crosby would just as soon do whatever it takes to keep the Pens’ bounce-back from being a one-year wonder and help Pittsburgh remain a playoff team as a best case scenario. But since this is a personal ideal, that would involve a 90 point season to pass Howe, a contract extension for 2027-28 and another appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs come next spring.

Bottom line

Crosby’s case to be the greatest of his time doesn’t need any more supporting evidence but he provided more anyways with one of the best age-38 seasons in NHL history. 2025-26 was both rewarding for him to play well and lead the Pens back to the playoffs after three straight seasons of missing the postseason, yet filled with significant frustrations due to the injury suffered at the Olympics that knocked the rest of his season off track.

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Pensburgh Grade: A–

Pittsburgh’s leader and captain came through one more time, to the surprise of absolutely no one. The first half of his season was A+ work, his performance was likely limited from there due to the injury. Still, the production was there, the wins were back and now he’s setup for a 22nd season with the Penguins with reason to be energized and excited for the upcoming season.