If it weren’t for the ubiquitously beloved Pittsburgh Steelers and their cast of characters, there’s no doubt that Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby would be the most popular athlete in town. Sid The Kid has already led the Penguins to Stanley Cup glory once in his still-young career, and nearly did so again last year before Pittsburgh bowed out in Game 7 of the Finals to the Montreal Canadians. There will be more parades and championship celebrations to come though. You can count on that.
Crosby joined 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh on Monday to talk about that bitter loss in the Finals, what he’s been hard at work on this offseason to get better individually, what he thinks of the new-look roster, and other topics. Below are a few excerpts from the interview.
What part of his game he worked at during the offseason:
“Well obviously I think I was trying to just make the most of a bit of the offseason basically trying to improve strength and speed and probably focus a little more on off-ice stuff trying to make sure that I had a good foundation here coming into camp and I felt strong and re-energized a bit so I feel like I was able to do that so now it is time to work on the ice and keep building on those.”
How long the Game 7 loss to the Canadiens stayed with him:
“Not that long. Some people react differently to those kind of things and for me I like at game 7 and anything can happen in game 7 and obviously that wasn’t the way that we wanted it to play out, but at the same time we had opportunities in game 6 to close out the series and there is so many things that you could look at that go into not winning and sometimes it is not really that much. It is a fine line between winning and losing so I was able to forget it pretty quickly once the season was over. Once you are going into July and you realize, you know what, what happened last year doesn’t really matter now because we everyone is starting fresh coming into September and once you realize that I think you look forward to starting and hopefully that little motivation helps you.”