Sidney Crosby to Miss All-Star Game – Is He Injured or Sitting Out?

Perhaps we should’ve seen this coming.

After weeks of hearing about how this year would mark the grand return of Sidney Crosby to the NHL All-Star Game, the Pittsburgh Penguins announced that their captain will miss the All-Star festivities due to a lower-body injury.

Crosby’s injury will reportedly take about a week to heal, per General Manager Jim Rutherford.

As he has only ever participated in one All-Star game in his career (2007 in Dallas) despite being selected five times thus far, fans were abuzz with the chance to finally see Crosby in action among the best of the league.

As it turns out, they won’t get that chance – and some are skeptical about the nature of Crosby’s exit from the events.

It has been argued that Crosby is perhaps not injured but simply taking the opportunity to rest rather than suiting up for the All-Star action all the way out in Columbus.

It wouldn’t be the first time the league’s superstars chose to sit out the event – Detroit’s Nicklas Lidstrom and Pavel Datsyuk notably decided to stay home from the All-Star weekend in 2009.

Due to decisions such as Lidstrom’s and Datsyuk’s, the league adopted a policy of banning players from the team’s first game back after All-Star break if they choose to remain out.

Thus, Crosby will be ineligible to play in Pittsburgh’s first post-All-Star game against the Winnipeg Jets on Jan. 27th.

Teammate Evgeni Malkin, who will also miss the festivities due to injury, has also been ruled out of the Penguins’ first game back as well.

Some have pointed to Crosby’s level of play in the Pens’ most recent game as evidence of a faulty injury story.

The Penguins captain led all forwards in ice-time with 23:06 against the Blackhawks, participating in all three periods, overtime, and the shootout.

While he didn’t rack up any points, he did post 4 shots and register 3 hits throughout the game.

That being said, it wouldn’t be too hard to believe that Crosby is a little bruised and battered from the team’s previous game against Philadelphia, considering he took some considerable damage from the Flyers all night long.

It very well could be the case that Crosby played through the injury against what he recognized as a key game against one of the league’s elite teams, the Chicago Blackhawks, knowing that Malkin and Kris Letang would both be sidelined already.

With the already long list of key injuries, a Penguins team playing without Crosby, Malkin, and Letang wouldn’t have stood a chance against the stacked Blackhawks. If Crosby is injured, his decision to play against Chicago may have well earned Pittsburgh the one point they gained from the contest.

Regardless, it seems Crosby and Malkin will both get some much needed rest over the coming weekend, leaving netminder Marc-Andre Fleury as the only Penguins representative at All-Star weekend.

Fleury was added to the All-Star roster as an injury replacement after both Jimmy Howard and Pekka Rinne were forced out of the festivities with their own respective injuries.

While the All-Star game is prone being somewhat underwhelming to begin with, it seems the event will be considerably lacking for Pittsburgh fans this time around, but the Penguins faithful will surely be happy to let their stars rest up in order to make a strong push over the second half of the season.

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