Brandon Dubinsky Swatch Card

I love players who get under Sidney Crosby's skin. Granted, that's more than half the league's checking centers, but some do it better than others, often leading to his losing patience and dishing out some of the dirtiest hits or slashes in the modern-day game. And, with Maxim Lapierre gone, Brandon Dubinsky is the Van Gogh of that art form.

It helps that he's usually among the league leaders in face-offs won, gaining control of the puck so opponents - and mostly Crosby - have to chase it around the ice...

In recent years, however, Dubinsky has seemed content to just agitate Sid The Kid and forgot that he can also be pretty effective at producing points rather than just stopping opponents from racking them up - and against Crosby in particular, that hasn't stopped the Pittsburgh Penguins from totally owning the Columbus Blue Jackets in the past couple of years.

Dubinsky himself has gone from a 50-point threat to 41 last year and just 2 (two!!! - and both of them assists!) in 12 games this year. He hasn't scored 20 goals since doing it in back-to-back seasons with the New York Rangers (2009-10 and 2010-11), and head coach John Tortorella - who's known Dubs since his days in Manhattan and clashed with him once or twice at that time - made the difficult decision to remove the alternate captain's "A" from Dubinsky's jersey last week.

Torts' tough-love approach has worked with Dubinsky in the past, and with other stars as well (Vincent Lecavalier comes to mind, as does Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovsky). We'll see how this one pans out, but Dubinsky is 31 and has three more years to go on a deal that pays him $5.85M per, which means his production should be around 40, 40, 35 and 33 points for the last four years of his deal for it to be worth its value, with plus/minuses between +5 and +10 and a 52-55% face-off win percentage (he's at 48.8 this year and finished last season at 51.7).

Here he is wearing the blue jackets' beautiful third jersey from the past decade, on card #D-DU from Panini's 2013-14 Dominion set and Authentic Material sub-set:

It features a matching blue game-worn jersey swatch that could very well be from his days in New York. It's numbered 52-99.

Brandon Dubinsky Jersey And Stick Card

Looks like Brandon Dubinsky has earned himself a nice payday: he signed a 6-year, $35.1M contract extension earlier today with an annual cap hit of $5.85M. Sure, that's a lot of money for a guy whose highest points total (54) was in 2010-11, but let's not forget the cap went up to just over $69M for the upcoming season and should increase by a minimum of 2.5 per year for the next five or six, meaning his cap hit in percentage will have decreased a lot when his contract comes to an end in 2021.

And while the two-time 20-goal scorer who was the 60th overall pick of the 2004 draft via the New York Rangers may not be a offensive dynamo, he was my choice to be the next captain of the Columbus Blue Jackets last year. His leadership qualities are obvious, and he's more productive come playoff time than in the regular season - his 23 points in 37 games are a decent average against better teams, and his 6 points in 6 games against the Pittsburgh Penguins while contributing to annoy Sidney Crosby two months ago were also impressive.

He knows when to step up his game, as can be attested by his career-high 10 hits in a single game occurring during a Winter Classic (2012, against the Philadelphia Flyers); he was also the MVP of the YoungStars game in 2008 and recorded a hat trick at the World Championships suiting up for Team USA.

I alluded to this card last month, which I got in a trade for a dozen (mostly common) Score Hot Rookies cards (and some extras); it's from Panini's 2011-12 Luxury Suite set (card #15), featuring a game-worn white jersey swatch with a piece of game-used stick on which you can decipher the bottom of the 'R' from the Bauer logo on top: