As readers point out, Crosby may be worth cap issue

	Sidney Crosby recently signed a five-year, $43.5 million contract extension with the Penguins. Lou Capozzola/SI
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Is it February already? The way the love letters have poured in since Tuesday's column regarding Sidney Crosby's new contract, I thought we had to be closing in on Valentine's Day.

Here's a fairly representative example from the mailbag (although, admittedly, the language was more salty in most):

Are you completely mental? How can you suggest Sidney Crosby doesn't want to win? He could have asked for the maximum allowed under the salary cap, but instead took a hometown discount to help the team. That's real leadership for you. Instead of being selfish, he put the team first, and that's why the Pens will win the Cup multiple times over the life of that contract.
-- Sandra Richardson, Cleveland

Let me reiterate a point I made in the column, Sandra: if any player in the league deserves the maximum salary allowed under the cap ($10.03 million), it's Sid. No question about it. If he'd demanded it, I've no doubt Pens GM Ray Shero would gladly have handed him a blank contract and simply asked him to fill in the length of term.

In fact, if I were running the league, I'd take Sid's contract off Pittsburgh's books and simply make each of the 30 teams chip in half a million each. For what he means to the NHL in terms of marketing the game in the present and future, that'd be a bargain for everyone involved.

All that said -- again, Sid is good, deserves full access to the bank, nice to have him locked up -- that contract is not the win-win most are painting it to be.

Look at a couple of recent extensions signed by Joe Thornton and Jarome Iginla. Both have plenty of skins on the wall, are the lynchpins of their team, and rank among the top five or so forwards in the league. Over the same five-year period, they signed for an average of $7.2 and $7 million, respectively, compared to Crosby's $8.7 million.

The difference between those deals and Crosby's may not seem significant, but it is. The $1.3 million Crosby left on the table annually buys a Jarkko Ruutu or Brooks Orpik-type depth player. The $3 million left by the Thornton and Iginla? That covers the cost of keeping an impact, top-six forward like Jonathan Cheechoo or Daymond Langkow. Big difference for a team trying to build a legitimate contender.

I'm not going to say this contract proves Crosby doesn't want to win. He does. But if it was his top priority, he could have drawn on the examples of Iginla and Thornton, and made life a whole lot easier for Shero to pick up the pieces he needs down the road to build a winner.

I think you underestimate the impact of the NHLPA in the Crosby negotiations. Do you think there's any way they'd let him take less than market value and set an artificially low bar for everyone else?
-- R. Nitt, Etobicoke, Ontario

I'm sure some faction of the PA encouraged Crosby's camp to max this deal out. But at the same time, I doubt they were a major influence. After all, contracts are used as comparables, and Crosby is as useful as a comparable today as Wayne Gretzky was in his time. The bar for elite players was set by the Thornton and Iginla deals.