(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 strange to say that a player who has 37 points in 32 games this season is slumping, but you can very safely say that about someone whose talent is as singular as Sidney Crosby's.

Crosby has, of course, been in a slump for a while now, but things really came to a head in Pittsburgh on Saturday night because, a) the Penguins were shut out 3-0 by Washington and, b) he has just 11 goals in his last 50 games (including playoffs). Suffice it to say that this is the worst fallow stretch of Crosby's career — and in fact, 37 in 32 constitutes his worst points-per-game pace of any season in his career — and things have only worsened of late. He has only one goal and four points in his nine December games.

This is obviously bringing the city of Pittsburgh to crisis-level hysteria because if Sidney Crosby isn't leading the league in scoring when he's healthy — and we have every indication that he is, apart from that mumps scare a few weeks ago — and the fact of the matter is that Crosby just doesn't feel dominant any more. If this were anyone else having this kind of dropoff in production (about 11 percent in points, and 31 percent in goals) for a team's biggest star, trade talks would inevitably start swirling.

This is like if Steven Stamkos went from 50 goals to 34. Or if Ryan Getzlaf's points slipped from 90 to 80. They're still very good players, who unquestionably contribute a lot to their teams, but they're not as good as they should be. Crosby is going through the same things, but given how large his goal and points totals tend to be, the drop-offs in both regards are stark

What I think is pretty clear, though, is that people don't understand why this is happening.

For one thing, it's important to note that there has been virtually no change in his assist rate. That is to say, his teammates are scoring on his passes more or less at the same pace as last year (0.85 in 2013-14 to 0.84 so far this year). Both are below his career average of 0.9 per game but not appreciably so. Likewise, his on-ice shooting efficiency is down to 8.9 percent from the previous year's 9.8 percent, a decline which comes more or less as a result of his own problems and not actually anything his teammates are or are not doing.

Which means that this is a Crosby problem, rare though such a thing may be in this world. So what's going wrong for him, specifically?

Well, he's just as dominant as ever in terms of driving possession. Straight across the board he's destroying the competition just like always: 53.6 percent corsi, up from last year when he was the MVP. And 53.2 percent fenwick, down very slightly. And 63.9 percent goals-for, up massively from the 57.5 percent seen a year ago. The latter number can be attributed to the change for Marc-Andre Fleury from a little below replacement level to world-beating netminder, though, because his individual goals-for per 60 minutes (2.9) is at the lowest point by far seen in his entire career, and certainly on average (3.8).

So what's the issue? He's personally not putting the puck on net enough, and he's been very unlucky. That's about it.

Crosby has attempted just 150 shots in all situations this season, or 14.5 per 60 minutes of ice time. Last year, he attempted 420, or 14.3 per minute. Now, that's obviously an improvement, but he got very lucky last year, with a smaller percentage of his shot attempts getting on net (258/61.4 percent, versus this year's 98/65.3 percent) but a far larger percentage actually going in: 14 percent to just 10.2 percent. The problem is that both of these numbers are way, way down from his average from 2007-08 — the start of advanced-stats tracking in the NHL — to the lockout-shortened 2013 season of 15.9 shot attempts per 60.

If Crosby's shooting this year were as accurate as last season, he'd have 14 goals and not 10, and his goals per game would be down just a single hundredth of a point from last season. And we probably wouldn't be having this conversation at all. It's funny to say it, but Crosby's “big slump” is because he has four fewer goals in 32 games than he should.