Hal Gill arrived in Pittsburgh at the 2008 trade deadline and went straight into his first practice with his new teammates. Somewhere in that session he found himself in a position every defenseman in the league would have recognized, with Sidney Crosby driving wide and leaning in low.
Gill is 6-foot-7. He could have ended it.
“I felt like if I gave him another shove I could have wiped him out and sent him into the boards,” Gill said on Elliotte Friedman’s 32 Thoughts podcast. “I kind of backed off and Sid went in and scored, and all the boys are going ‘Whoah!’ because the new guy just got smoked by Crosby.”
The embarrassment wasn’t the problem. Crosby found him in the line afterwards.
“Crosby came right over to me in the line after and was like, ‘What was that all about?’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he goes, ‘You didn’t finish me,'” Gill said.
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Gill tried to explain himself with what he thought was obvious logic.
“I said, ‘Sid, you’re the best player in the game. You’re my teammate now. I’m not going to finish you,'” he recalled.
That went down badly.
“And he’s like, ‘Well, if you’re going to let me go then you’re not going to practice at game speed! Then what’s the point?'”
How big was Hal Gill?
At 6-foot-7 he was one of the tallest players in NHL history, which is how he ended up with the nickname “The USS Hal Gill” during his time in Pittsburgh. He built a 16-season career on exactly the kind of physical defending he declined to use that day, racking up 960 penalty minutes across 1,106 games while scoring only 36 goals.
Pittsburgh had acquired him from Toronto on February 26, 2008, giving up a second-round pick and a fifth-rounder for a penalty killer and some size on the blue line. The two went on to win the Stanley Cup together the following season.
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