EJ and the Whalers

Another interesting link between the Hurricanes/Whalers and the Penguins is one of the most recognizable faces in Pens history - none other than Eddie Johnston. EJ served as Pittsburgh's GM from 1983 to 1988, and head coach twice, from 1980 to 1983 and later from 1993 to 1997.

Aside from his drafting of Mario Lemieux in 1984, the biggest move he made as a GM in relation to the Penguins was when he was sitting in the Whalers' GM chair in 1991. In March of that year he traded two of the big names in the Penguins Stanley Cup runs to the Steel City: Ron Francis and Ulf Sameulsson. This article from the March 6, 1991 Post-Gazette has reactions from the two key recent arrivals (and defenseman Grant Jennings, another Whaler who came over in the trade and who helped bolster the Pens blueline) and a few of their new teammates.

18 years ago, Penguins win 1st Stanley Cup

Hard to believe, but anyone born on the day the Penguins won their first Cup would today be turning 18 and is now officially an adult! If that's making anyone out there feel old, well, just click on this link and browse the article it leads to and the rest of the pieces in this package from the May 27, 1991 Post-Gazette, celebrating the Penguins first Stanley Cup two nights earlier. They'll make you feel better. What a time...and hopefully we'll all have the same vibes again in a couple of weeks.

(You have to love that Penguins logo at the top of these pages with the skating penguin finally hoisting the Cup!)

Readers are welcome to write in their memories of that amazing day on a warm Saturday night in May...

Canes GM was Pens goalkeeper

The Penguins and Hurricanes have never met in the playoffs (even dating back to when the Canes were the Hartford Whalers) and have never had much of a rivalry, but there are still some interesting links between the franchises.

For instance, Carolina GM Jim Rutherford was a goalie for the Penguins for three seasons, from 1971-72 to 1973-74. Those teams weren't particularly good ones, and the situation in net never seemed to be very stable. Rutherford was often battling with Dennis Herron and Andy Brown for the top spot, with none of them really taking a firm grasp of it.

It certainly wasn't for a lack of effort on Rutherford's part, though. This article from the October 20, 1972 Post-Gazette relates just how much fight the "doughty little goalkeeper" had in him.

For Rutherford's complete Penguin stats and a nice pic of him, check out this great page. (Can you guess who the player trying to score on him is?)

Malone misses Whalers tilt - why?

The Penguins current opponent, the Carolina Hurricanes, used to be the Hartford Whalers, who came into the league in 1979 as one of the four World Hockey Association clubs that joined the NHL as part of a merger of the two circuits that year. The Penguins tied the Whalers the first time the teams met on Oct. 13, 1979, and dropped a 7-5 decision the next time 'round in the Insurance City on Nov. 30.

Perhaps they lost that game because they were missing one of their better scorers, Greg Malone. Why was he absent? Not for any of the usual reasons a player is kept out, like an injury or a benching. No, Malone missed the game because the day before, his wife gave birth to Ryan Gregory, as mentioned in this summary of Penguins-goings-on from the Dec. 3, 1979 Post-Gazette. Who knew back then that the new arrival would go on to wear his father's number 12 for the Penguins years later?

Brotherly battles

Here's another article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette following the Pens first semi-final series in 1970, which they lost to the Blues in six games. The attitude seemed pretty upbeat despite the loss, with the sellout Igloo crowd (the rink only held 12,403 at that time) giving the team a rousing thank you. The future of coach Red Kelly as Penguins coach seemed to be in doubt, with other teams knocking at his door. The rumour of him going to Toronto would eventually come true, but not until 1973, after he was fired by the Penguins.

Also mentioned later in the article is the Blues' Bill McCreary, who, just like Eric Staal today, was facing off against his Penguin-uniform-wearing brother in a semi-final series. Bill faced Keith while Eric is, of course, battling with Jordan.

Penguins first semi-final - 1970

The puck will drop tomorrow on the Penguins' seventh Stanley Cup semi-final series (or Conference Final, as they're now known). They are 3-3 overall. The Pens played their first one in only their third year of existence, in the 1969-70 season, against the St. Louis Blues. That sounds impressive, but one must remember that all they had to do to make it that far back then was to beat out two of their other five expansion brethren for one of the four playoff spots in the NHL's West Division (which grouped all six new teams together), and then win a playoff round against one of them.

Mission accomplished on both fronts. The Penguins, after missing the playoffs in their first two years, claimed second place in the West and then took out the Oakland Seals in four straight in the first round.

In the Blues, they faced a team that had proved to be the best in the West the previous two years, only to be swept by the mighty Montreal Canadiens in both Final series.

The 1970 Pens-Blues series, according to the press reports, was a red-knuckle slugfest. This wire story following a Game 1 Penguins 3-1 loss has some tough talk from Pens coach Red Kelly, whose Irish temper seems to have been brought to a boil by the Blues.

The Penguins would lose the first two games, prompting Blues coach and future Penguin bench boss Scotty Bowman to make a bold assertion, one that would surely be jumped on by the opposition and media in today's era. See the third column of this playoff summary story.

The Penguins would eventually fall in six games to the Blues, who would again be swept in the Final, this time by the Boston Bruins and Bobby Orr, who ended the series with his famous "flying though the air" Cup clinching-goal. The Penguins would not reach the semi-final round again until 1991.

Beers with the enemy

There was a great story in yesterday's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review summarizing the Penguins' previous Game 7s. The first one came in 1975 - the infamous loss to the Islanders that capped a collapse after being up 3 games to none. The article describes an almost unbelieveable anecdote about what happened after the game:

Ed Westfall scored the only goal — a backhander that beat goaltender Gary Inness — with 5:18 left in regulation to complete the visiting New York Islanders' comeback from a 3-0 deficit, a hole no other team has escaped from since — only one team, the 1942 Maple Leafs, against Detroit in the Cup final, had done it previously. The Penguins had their chances; Pierre Larouche hit the post twice. Westfall was late leaving the dressing room after the game and ran into Penguins center Syl Apps, who wondered why Westfall was all by himself. "I told him, 'Everybody left. Where are you guys going?' " Westfall later recalled. "He said, 'The Pleasure Bar.' So I went with the Penguins players and their wives to the Pleasure Bar and sat there drinking until sunrise."

I wonder what was said around that table.... It would have been impossible for Westfall to gloat, especially with the wives there. Maybe one day we'll find out.

A bit about this blog...

Thanks to Google’s News Archive application, a huge volume of back issues from newspapers all over the world is now available on your very own computer screen. For a guy like me with a fondness for both history and newspapers, this has been an exciting development. The process of getting to this information in the past used to be laborious, to say the least.

My own experience involved, first, trudging down to one of the few libraries that had old issues of a limited number of papers. I’d then have to request what issues (on microfiche) I wanted to view from the librarian and, once secured, load them into a creaking microfiche viewer and begin cranking its old leaver around to get to the pages I wanted to see. I’d use the few inches of space in my cubicle not taken up by the monstrosity to scribble down what notes I had to make.

I did this primarily while researching two articles I wrote in the early ’90s, one on the old Pittsburgh Pirates hockey club of the ’20s and another on the team they became, the Philadelphia Quakers. Don’t get me wrong – looking at all those old articles and ads from years ago was a lot of fun. And the bottom line was, with widespread availability of the Internet still a few years away, there was at that time no other way to see the material. If a dog has a small bone and doesn’t know there’s a bigger one over the fence, he’s not upset – just content with what he has. And so was I.

But now, with these archives available to me in the comfort of my own home, accessible on my schedule and not the library’s, I can’t help but look back on those days and marvel at how arcane both the technology and the process were.

Things, of course, still aren’t perfect. More archived newspaper content is coming online, thanks in large part to Google’s efforts to digitize as much of it as they can. And many big papers have been bringing their old content online, but a large number of them still require a fee to view it.

Some papers, though, seem to have welcomed the Google initiative with open arms and have made their back issues available through Google for no charge. By a huge stroke of good luck, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of them. That basically means I’m now able to start this blog and highlight all the great jewels of Penguins historical information that previously sat locked away in microfiche archives in the ‘Burgh.

I hope everyone enjoys the stuff I link to here. Feel free to let me know your thoughts either by e-mail or through the commenting function at the bottom of each post. I’d love to hear your memories of Penguins hockey!

- Greg

A Game 7 win in Washington

I'm sitting here pretty bummed out by the Pens OT loss tonight, which means we're headed back to Washington for a seventh and deciding game. And what a game it will surely be, although I would much rather not have to see it.

This won't be the first time the Penguins will head to Capital-land for a seventh game. The first time was in 1992, when Mario and Co. completed a monumental comeback from a 3-1 series deficit by polishing off the Caps with a rock-solid defensive performance and timely scoring. It was the type of game that showed the hockey world that the high-flying Penguins could clamp down as well as any team when the had to; they limited Washington to a mere 19 shots in the 3-1 triumph.

This article from the May 2,1992 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reveals another similarity to this year's titanic battle: both teams featured stunning offenses. The Pens led the league in scoring (343 goals), while the Caps were second-best (330).

And here's a piece about the game from the New York Times, which has a headline I liked.

Playoff injuries

So it looks like the Penguins will be without their best defenceman and power play quarterback, Sergei Gonchar, for quite some time. Thanks, Mr. Ovechkin. The ire Pens fans are now feeling toward the Caps #8 is similar to that they felt towards one Adam Graves back in the Stanley Cup run of 1992. Graves took a wicked two-hander to the wrist of Mario Lemieux in Game 2 of the Wales Conference final that year. The day after the game, it was unclear how long Le Magnifique would be out, and Pens fans feared the worst.

This article from the May 7, 1992 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette captures the anger brewing in the Penguin locker room. Also have a look at the story below this one, which captures sparkplug leader Rick Tocchet's thoughts on the matter.

Of course, Mario would come back earlier than expected and lead the Pens to a second-straight Cup victory. Here's hoping Sergei has a similarly quick recovery!

1979: George Ferguson wins it in OT

What a thriller that was last night, with the Penguins beating the Caps with an overtime marker by Kris Letang. Add it to the list of great Penguin overtime moments.

One of the best came 30 years ago last month, in the third and deciding game of the Pens' preliminary round series against the Sabres. The hero that night was George Ferguson, who came streaking down the left side of the ice in the Buffalo's old "Aud" and beat Bob Sauve early in the first OT frame.

Buffalo, only four years removed from a Finals appearance and still sporting a wealth of speed and talent, were favoured to take out the Pens with relative ease. But a combination of grit and spectacular goaltending from Dennis Herron enabled Pittsburgh to move on and send the Sabres golfing.

This Associated Press story from April 15, 1979 tells all about it.

And if you want to see the goal, check out these 13 seconds of pure Pittsburgh Penguin glory!

Pens trailed 2-0 in 1991 - and won!

The Pens return to the Igloo down 2-0 to the Washington Capitals tonight. They lost two close games in which it would be patently wrong to say they were outplayed to any large degree. In fact, these young Pittsburghers come home filled with as much optimism about their chances as any team down 2-0 ever has.

The situation is quite similar to that of the 1991 Pens, who came back to the Civic Arena down 2-0 to the Boston Bruins in their Wales Conference Final series. Despite the losses, including a hard-fought overtime affair in Game 2, the Penguins felt they had been anything but dominated by the Bruins and liked their chances quite well, thank you very much. In fact, winger Kevin Stevens predicted they would come back and win the series...which they did, rhyming off four straight victories and moving on to their first Stanley Cup Final appearance.

This article from the May 5, 1991 New York Times presents a nice summary of the management changes in Pittsburgh that started the ball rolling on the team's resurgence, as well as a nice quote from coach Badger Bob Johnson about some whistle-happy referees in Game 2.

And for all of us Pens fans hoping for a turnaround in 2009 like we saw in '91, check out this small piece in the May 14, 1991 Post-Gazette about one of the many nice things that can happen when your team wins!

Caps beat Pens - for the first time

The Capitals grabbed a 1-0 series lead this afternoon by beating the Penguins 3-2. Thirty-four years (and a couple of weeks) ago, the Caps claimed their first victory against Pittsburgh: an 8-4 romp on the last day of Washington's inaugural season, 1974-75. The triumph put a positive period on a truly miserable season for the young Capitals, representing one of only eight (that's right - eight) wins they earned all year. Thier 0.131 winning percentage was the worst ever recorded by an NHL team, besting the previous most pathetic mark of 0.136, set by the sad-sack Philadelphia Quakers in 1930-31.

As this article from the April 7, 1975 Post-Gazette says, the Penguins were done in by some shaky goaltending and perhaps by looking ahead to the upcoming playoffs.

Pens-Caps - The game that started it all

The Penguins will begin their eighth playoff series against the Washington Capitals on Saturday. With a Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin battle on the menu, the series will no doubt add another memorable chapter to what has turned into a long and heated rivalry over the years.

Where did it all start, you ask?

The teams first met on November 16, 1974 at the Civic Arena, during the Caps' inaugural season. The dreadful D.C.ers came in with only one win in 16 contests and would be going up against a Pens team that was starting to develop into a potent offensive force, thanks in large part to the play of rookie Pierre Larouche. In this preview article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the day of the game, we learn that it's Larouche's 19th birthday and that he seems a little worried about how his teammates might help him celebrate.

Have a look at the "Civic Arena Rosters" and see if you recognize any of the players in the Caps column. No? Well, don't be ashamed. This was certainly a collection of nobodys, save perhaps for goalie Ron Low, who enjoyed a long playing career and went on to become an NHL head coach. And if you're a Caps fan, you'll know #7 Yvon Labre, the first Washington player to have his number retired.

The Pens, by the way, would rout the Capitals, 8-1.