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Home > Hockey > NHL Teams > Pittsburgh Penguins
Pittsburgh Penguins
NHL, the National Hockey League is a premier professional North American Sports League played in indoor stadiums. It’s divided into two conferences, each comprising of three divisions of ice hockey teams. The league was established in 1917 in Montreal, Quebec and it is composed of 30 teams out of which 24 teams based in U.S. and 6 in Canada. They have a regular season and playoffs leading to the Stanley Cup, which is the NHL Championship final.
Pittsburgh Penguins are a professional ice hockey team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They began play in NHL, National Hockey League as a 1967 expansion team. Pittsburgh was one of six cities which were awarded an expansion team when the NHL doubled in size for the start of the 1967-68 season.
The Penguins first general manager was Jack Riley. The new teams were hampered by restrictive rules that kept most major talent with the Original Six the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Boston Bruins, New York Rangers and Chicago Blackhawks and beyond aging ex-Rangers star Andy Bathgate and tough ex-Bruin defenseman Leo Boivin, the first Penguins team was manned by a cast of former minor-leaguers. The club missed the playoffs in their first season in the NHL finishing 5th in the closely fought West Division. However, they were only six points out of first place.
The 2004-05 NHL season cancelled due to the NHL lockout, several Penguins signed with the club's American Hockey League affiliate Wilkes-Barre Penguins, while experienced players like Aleksey Morozov and Milan Kraft sharpened their talents in the best European and Russian leagues.
The Penguins continued to be a terrible team throughout the 1990s. The stars of the Stanley Cup years were followed by the likes of forwards Martin Straka, Petr Nedved, Alexei Kovalev and Robert Lang, and defencemen Sergei Zubov, Kevin Hatcher and Darius Kasparaitis. Lemieux retired in 1997 and formally passed the torch to Jagr as the league's leading scorer. Because of his legendary status, the Hockey Hall of Fame waived its three-year waiting period and inducted him as an Honoured Member in the same year he retired.
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