omg okay there’s a point i wanna bring attention to re: sidney when he fights on the ice….
sid gif sources: rinkrats/suiheisen, hunterrrs
i would argue that sid’s the best fighter on the ice (therefore worst person to be targeted by) because he’s so effective at it, largely due to his incredibly strong base (lower half)
look at gifs of sid when he’s fighting vs any other nhl player against each other. other players are usually spinning around or skates slipping back and forth. they usually have one arm each out as a post, bracing against the other player. that means that other player can’t get closer to them. it also means that THEY can’t get closer either. if u wanna do damage, it’s pretty ineffective.
sidney crosby however, is INSANE, and i am actually terrified of him because he fights way too good for someone who realistically shouldn’t know how to fight like that even at an average level, and i’ll explain why:
first and foremost - he has a very specific, very effective way of fighting, a formula almost, that follows the fundamentals of a takedown (used in all grappling sports e.g wrestling, mma, jiujitsu, vale tudo)
firstly, he always catches them when they’re off balance and if they’re not, he shoves them until they’re more off balance. that just means movement of some sort because you’re most stable when you’re low and not moving.
then, he’ll break their base down from the top. he will either reach behind their head to grab the back of the neck and then pull down, almost like a snap down you would see in folkstyle wrestling, mma and brazillian jiujitsu.
if he doesn’t get the snap down immediately, he stays up top and basically shakes them left and right (again, breaking down their base and their stability) but it’s not like he grabs them by the shoulders and shakes them back and forth, he twists them left to right. a lot of takedowns in martial arts work well when you can destabilise the person’s base in several directions. i’ve literally done back take downs by getting a hold of them and just wobbling them back and forth because eventually they stumble and fall.
you can see what i mean in this example here:
shoves 19 until he’s off balance, first goes to reach for the behind the head to grab the jersey/neck, 19 ducks out of it, so then he grabs him by the shoulders and uses his hips and core to wring him side to side until he can get 19 on to the ground.
you can kinda see the similarities to olympic wrestling here in the scrambling, fighting for head control, and snapdown attempts (there aren’t very many wrestling gifs i could find so please bare with me)
the insane thing is, is that he does that while moving at ridiculous speeds too. same principles apply here when he’s in motion - catches them off balance, at least one hand controlling the head, keeps their base broken and lower than him, before using the power from his core to throw them
if he gets dragged into the fight as a 1-on-1 it goes 2 ways: he maintains control of the head and pushes it down into the ground, basically playing a pressure game so that his opponent cannot get back up without breaking out of his grip. your options are limited here because the floor doesn’t have enough friction for you to effectively move. the only thing you would do would be to rotate out of his grip, IF you knew how to grapple.
sidney leans all his weight down (what we call playing a pressure game) on the players head because that’s where his base is weakest. the other player is attempting to get his knees underneath him to post up and re-establish his base, but he can’t because of the ice.
it doesn’t get better for the opponent if they’re BOTH on the ice. the fundamentals of grappling and takedowns are still applicable, and he applies them with ease. compare sidney grappling with the other player, and grappling in a ufc match and no-gi at a jiujitsu gym.
sidney manages to be an insanely good wrestler/grappler, and he picked all that up without ever doing a martial arts class. i say this with the utmost admiration because i’ve been doing jiujitsu/mma/wrestling for almost a decade now, and the fact that he essentially learnt those fundamentals just through hockey, and then proceeds to become THE best at it on the ice? that’s terrifying.
tl;dr sidney crosby is the best fighter in the NHL, absolutely insane, and therefore the absolutely last person i would ever want to get in a fight with
