There is a running joke inside the Pittsburgh Penguins dressing room that goes something like this: As long as Sidney Crosby captains the team, there can be no such thing as an optional practice.

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Says Penguins coach Michel Therrien about Sidney Crosby: "When the leader of the team buys in, everyone else has no choice but to follow."

Photograph by : Bruce Bennett, Getty Images

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Sure, the coach will write "Optional" on the white board now and again. But when your captain, leader and best player laces up his skates for an optional practice -- something Crosby does every single time -- there is no way that a lesser player cannot follow and still look his teammates in the eye.

Now, look at how these Penguins have gone in one year from first-round fodder to a berth in the Stanley Cup final. Of course, there is always more than just one reason, but what this team has figured out well before its time is that no matter how talented everybody tells them they are, if they don't outwork the opponent, they will not win.

Now where do you think that comes from?

"Everyone knows what [Crosby] can do on the ice," linemate Pascal Dupuis said. "What brings him to another level is he's so driven. That's his main quality. He wants to win so bad."

As these playoffs have worn on, and the virtuoso Evgeni Malkin has been mostly a superstar -- though at times a contact-wary perimeter guy --Crosby has been the whole package every single night. Some nights the points are there. Others not. But after three rounds he leads his team(and the league, prior to last night's game) with 21 points, and he has had his best all-around games in series-clinching games.

On Sunday, as Pittsburgh bullied Philadelphia to the tune of 6-0, Crosby was an absolute horse.

"He played his best game of the series on both sides of the ice," said head coach Michel Therrien, who is teaching Crosby the same competitive elements of the game that Glen Sather once taught Wayne Gretzky. "When the leader of the team buys in, everyone else has no choice but to follow."

If the argument goes, who is the better player at his best -- Crosby or Malkin -- then you had better order a round. Because it will take some discussion to solve that one.

But if the debate is which player should be wearing the 'C' for Pittsburgh, well, there is none. Crosby does more and with greater consistency.

"He's not our captain at age 20 for no reason," Therrien said. "He's our captain for a lot of reasons."

As the next great Canadian superstar brings his team to a Stanley Cup final at age 20 and in only his third NHL season -- Gretzky was 22 and in his fifth NHL season, Mario Lemieux was 25 in his seventh season -- there is perhaps a jumping-off point for comparison.

Crosby doesn't operate in a vacuum on the ice the way Gretzky did. Ninety-nine was seemingly always surrounded by a cushion of uninhabited space that defied logic, considering he always had the puck.

The game doesn't allow a great player to exploit gaps and open spaces anymore the way Gretzky did, a change Lemieux railed against.

There aren't as many players, either, who a player of Crosby's ample talent can simply school one on one the way Lemieux so frequently did. Crosby's boss used to rack up his five-and six-point nights with what seemed an endless succession of his opponents' jock straps left in his wake, as even a great defenceman like Ray Bourque could be infamously turned inside-out by Lemieux's prodigious reach and lightning quick hands.