(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.)

The decline of Sidney Crosby has created a number of odd circumstances across the NHL.

The most important of these is that the title of “best forward alive” is a lot more up in the air than it was say, two years ago. You can suddenly make a case for a lot more players, including Crosby, holding that title.

It used to be that the answer to the question was “Sidney Crosby, [huge gap], some other guy.” That other guy fluctuated. Sometimes it was Evgeni Malkin, sometimes Steven Stamkos, sometimes Alex Ovechkin, and sometimes Jonathan Toews, among other players.

One name that occasionally cropped up in these rankings was Anze Kopitar, who made his eight-year, $80 million extension with Los Angeles official this week.

Over the last three years it was probably reasonable to argue that it has been Kopitar who has risen to the rank of “best in the league,” because when he's on the ice, other teams effectively have no chance to beat the Kings.

Let's start with the fact that over the last three seasons, Kopitar has only been on the ice for 83 goals against at full strength, despite playing nearly 2,900 minutes. That's a goals-against per 60 of just 1.73, second-fewest in the league among forwards with more than 2,500 minutes played since 2013-14. He also has possession numbers pushing 60 percent, ahead of guys like Patrice Bergeron and Joe Thornton, and well ahead of Jonathan Toews.

The thing with Kopitar is that everyone acknowledges his defensive prowess. The things he is able to do to keep people out of the Los Angeles zone for the vast majority of his time on ice should be studied like a Renoir: No one can do it, but everyone should want to know how he does. Here are his ranks among the 108 forwards with more than 2,500 minutes at 5-on-5 in the last three seasons in terms of events conceded to the other time per 60 minutes. It's almost literally unbelievable:

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Basically, no one gets to the net around him, no one bothers Jonathan Quick behind him, and certainly no one scores. This is, of course, the mark of great two-way players, and centers especially. By comparison, in the same categories Patrice Bergeron —widely regarded as the best defensive center in the league — ranks fifth, fifth, third, first, and 32nd, respectively. That is to say that he's almost always in the same neighborhood as Bergeron but concedes far fewer goals.

The difference between he and Bergeron, or even he and Toews to a lesser extent, is that he is a scoring machine as well, it just doesn't always show up where you'd expect.

Kopitar scores 1.91 points per 60 at 5-on-5, which puts him just inside the top-40 in the league over the last three seasons. Not a great number, but one has to keep in mind that this is in a Darryl Sutter system that necessarily depresses shooting percentages. The Kings win on quantity of shots and scoring chances, not quality, so for Kopitar to come up as an elite puck distributor at 5-on-5 — he has about as many primary assists in this time period as the Sedins, Jiri Hudler, Jonathan Toews, and John Tavares — is very impressive.