The Pittsburgh Penguins: An Illustrated Timeline

Although success in the NHL tends to be cyclical, the Penguins have taken that notion to extremes since coming into existence in 1967. They finished at the bottom of the standings several times and needed nearly a quarter-century to win their first division championship. By the time they had completed their 50th season, however, the Penguins owned five Stanley Cups--more than any other club that joined the NHL when it expanded from six to 12 clubs--and had once-in-a-lifetime talents appear on their payroll with stunning regularity. The turnaround began in 1984 when the Penguins drafted Mario Lemieux. Six years later, they added Jaromír Jágr. The Penguins got Evgeni Malkin in 2004 and Sidney Crosby a year after that. It was a bounty of riches no one could have envisioned when the franchise was sputtering though its early seasons, rarely aspiring to anything more lofty than a playoff berth. That doesn’t change the simple truth that, say, ＂Battleship＂ Kelly, the Century Line, and Jack McGregor, among so many others from the team’s first few decades, were as much a part of the fabric of the Penguins as Lemieux or Crosby. All of their stories are told here.

Dave Molinari has covered the Pittsburgh Penguins for more than four decades, primarily for The Pittsburgh Press from 1983 through 1992 and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1993 until mid-2019. He is a native of Western Pennsylvania and was the 2009 recipient of the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award, which is tantamount to induction into the writers’ wing of the Hockey Hall of Fame. He is the only Pittsburgh-based writer to be so honored.