Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

It's very en vogue these days to think Sidney Crosby, the best hockey player in the world, isn't as good as people think he is.

Mark Spector thinks Toews has “surged” ahead of Crosby. Michael Traikos says it's Toews now, but to check back in a few years. Kevin McGran “may well overtake Crosby for the title in these playoffs.” Daniel Friedman thinks Crosby's attitude is the reason he can't be taken seriously. A recent TSN panel with Jeff O'Neil and Claude Noel conceded the lack of clutch performances from Crosby is hold him back from being the best any more. I did a radio show in Pennsylvania the other day when a host told me Crosby is overrated. I've gotten a bunch of emails saying the same thing over the last few days.

Every one of these people is almost unbelievably wrong, as is anyone else who thinks anyone other than Crosby is the best player on earth. The reason that we're having this discussion at all is that Crosby went 1-8-9 in 13 playoff games for the Penguins' overall poor playoff performance and eventual collapse.

Meanwhile, Toews entered the Western Conference Final with 5-5-10 in 12 games, and four of those goals were game-winners, which his new backers will tell you is the most important aspect of all. And it conveniently ignores that Toews has gone up against Ryan Miller — who was abject from the second he got to St. Louis — and Ilya Bryzgalov, while Crosby faced the reigning Vezina winner Sergei Bobrovsky and Henrik Lundqvist, a top-three goalie in the game.

Because that's the thing with this new Crosby versus The World debate: It's predicated first and foremost on specious reasoning which largely cannot be proven to have any impact on the game at all.

Crosby didn't score a lot over a 13-game span, we can all agree on that. Toews scored more often, obviously. But the ability to score game-winning goals is not one that anyone can repeat. You can't will the puck into the net in only high-leverage situations; obviously some goals are worth more than others in terms of win expectancy — i.e. a goal in the first five minutes of a game doesn't have as much of an outcome on your team's chances for winning as much as one scored in the final five minutes — but if Toews or anyone else was actually able to “rise to the occasion” and so on, then why would he wait until overtime to score? Saying that overtime points or game-winning goals.

Toews is seen as more of a “winner” these days, too, and that's a big part of it. As Spector pointed out in his dross on the subject, the Penguins have won just four playoff rounds since Crosby lifted the Cup in 2009, while Toews has won four playoff rounds in a single postseason twice. The argument then is that Toews is more of a leader than Crosby, since he was the captain of those two teams, but it obviously ignores the fact that Crosby's team has been slowly and steadily getting worse in that time. You can tell because his GM just got fired. If you put Crosby on a line with Marian Hossa and Patrick Sharp, his point totals would be much higher than if Toews were playing the bulk of his minutes with Chris Kunitz and Lee Stempniak. That goes without saying, and everyone knows that. It's easy to lead when you have the best army in the world. Crosby — along with Evgeni Malkin — has basically carried the Penguins to being a very good regular-season team in the last few years all by himself while the walls crumbled.

But there's also the fact that Toews is a “better two-way player,” according to those who would put him ahead of Crosby. This is of course very difficult to say with certainty apart from The Eye Test, which allows bias to come into it — such bias, of course, typically goes against Crosby — because viewers will often see what they want to see. If Crosby hypothetically loses an own-zone faceoff that ends up in the back of the net 15 seconds later, then it's his fault, but if Toews loses one and the opponent doesn't score, then he has done more to prevent it. If it happens the other way around, no one seems to make much note of it.