Nov 8, 2014; Buffalo, NY, USA; Pittsburgh Penguins center Sidney Crosby (87) with the puck in the Buffalo Sabres zone during the third period at First Niagara Center. Penguins beat the Sabres 6-1. (Kevin Hoffman-USA TODAY Sports)

(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.)

In case you didn't hear about it (just kidding, you did), Sidney Crosby had five points against the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night.

This in and of itself is pretty unremarkable even if five assists is something that doesn't come along too often. The last player to do it was Jamie Benn to the pitiful Calgary Flames last season, and before that Crosby did it to the Islanders in March 2013. This was, in fact, the third five-assist game of Crosby's career. But what is remarkable is how infrequently Crosby is doing this kind of thing to lousy teams this year. He's mostly been doing it to good ones.

He has seven multiple-point games this season, five of which added three or more to his total each. Five three-point games out of 12 appearances. And a lot of them have been against legitimately good teams; the Ducks and Predators and Islanders and Devils have all seen him get in on at least two points. Yes, eight of his 24 points through 13 games this year have come in two games against Buffalo (all of them assists) but, a) you have to play who they put in front of you, and b) everyone else gets to play the Sabres too, and no one is doing something like this to them.

So Crosby is sitting on 24 points in 13 games, giving 1.85 points per game, by far the best pace of even his formidable career. His best scoring run in a full season was 1.52 per night in 2006-07, when he put up a league-leading 120. His injury-plagued 2010-11, 11-12, and 12-13 seasons all saw him eclipse that mark, but he played just 99 games between the three, and still racked up 159 points in them (1.61 per night).

It's difficult to imagine that anyone believes he's going to approach two points a game for all 82, but the thing is this: Only 12 players since 1917-18 have ever broken 1.75 points per game (Mike Bossy, Wayne Gretzky, Mari Lemieux, Jari Kurri, and Phil Esposito did it more than once). If Crosby were to keep anywhere near that pace he'd be the first guy to break the mark since 1995-96, when both Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr did so. These are video game numbers, plain and simple. Crosby's already almost a quarter of the way to another 100-point season (it'd be the sixth of his career, and he's reached that mark in any season in which he played 60 or more games), and he's played just 16 percent of the season.

What we are seeing is remarkable, but then the question becomes whether it's also sustainable.

After all, fully half of his points have come on the power play, and the Penguins simply aren't going to keep scoring on 37.5 percent of the man advantages they get. Crosby, in fact, leads the league in 5-on-4 on-ice shooting percentage (23.81), and it should come as no surprise that five of the top eight players in this category are also Penguins. Further, Crosby's career power play shooting percentage is “just” 14.38 percent, so yeah, that number is going to come down precipitously at some point, probably. But it won't be tomorrow, that's for sure, and it's not like the Penguins are never going to score on the power play with that much talent; their man advantage was first in the league last year as well, and it shot 14.3 percent with Crosby on the ice.

But let's say the Penguins' power play does drop off the face of the earth for the next 69 games. Crosby is still going to rack up a silly amount of points; his even-strength points per 60 since 2007-08 is 3.23, and the next-closest player in the league is Evgeni Malkin at 2.66. Which is to say he is head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. This year, though, it's 3.46, not so far above his career average that you would think he's doing anything all that differently. Meanwhile, the 13 guys ahead of his in 5-on-5 points per 60 are, as you might imagine, all dramatically outplaying their career numbers.

In fact, you might go so far as to say that Crosby has actually been a little unlucky, because his 5-on-5 on-ice shooting percentage is actually right in line with his career average, indicating that perhaps his personal shooting (8.7 percent, which has netted him just four goals of his own at evens, is below his career average) needs to improve a little bit.