The NHL in Pittsburgh, a Recent History
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 12:03 PM EDT
12 comments
With the Penguins heading into Game 7 this Friday, with a chance to win the third Stanley Cup in franchise history, this Pens fan is thinking back over all the things that have happened since the last Cup win. Things like:
1. The 1992-1993 season, when our star player was diagnosed with cancer, missed a third of a season, and still won the scoring title. And when our President's Trophy-winning team choked in the second round against the Islanders.
2. A lot of seasons in which we scored a ton of goals, played no defense, and did nothing in the playoffs.
3. The league continued its proud tradition of due diligence in allowing a crook named Howard Baldwin to buy the team. He ran it like a Ponzi scheme, and ran it into the ground. Which led to the second-best player in franchise history being traded to the Capitals in a salary dump.
4. The league also continued its proud tradition of building strong relationships with passionate, profitable hockey markets, by threatening for the better part of a decade to relocate the Penguins unless the city built a new arena with taxpayer dollars. Let's not forget that the city was in receivership at the time (i.e., not exactly flush with tax revenue). So, to review, the NHL was trying to shake down a bankrupt city for tax dollars, and telling that city that its unwillingness to do so meant that Pittsburgh just didn't care about hockey in a way that, say, Kansas City would. In colloquial terms, this is called kicking someone who isn't your enemy in the teeth while they're down.
5. Then there was last season's playoff run. And this season's adversity, followed by this season's playoff run.
6. Then came this series with Detroit, which has become known for two things: (1) two highly skilled, evenly matched teams; and (2) the Red Wings getting very favorable officiating each time they've needed a win at home. The latter didn't matter in game 5, but it arguably made a huge difference in game 2.
So, after almost 20 seasons of frustrations and disappointments, all I ask from the NHL is this: a fairly called game 7. You can let everything go on both sides if you want, but I'm changing the channel when the Wings get their 25th power play chance.
The content expressed in fanposts does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the staff here at Pensburgh.com. FanPosts are opinions expressed by fans of various teams throughout the league but may be more Pittsburgh-centric for obvious reasons.
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you make some great points...
…about the pens fans being able to look back on some hard times & us being able to be proud of our team, win or lose.
but at times this sounds and is far too much about conspiracy theories. no doubt you do have a point with certain things about the league, but i wouldnt go blaming ANY loss for either team on officiating cuz we’ve had our fair share of breaks as well. remember 6 men on the ice? now, i don’t think the officiating as been good this series because they’ve missed calls for both sides & they are calling things differently now than the rest of the season. but they’ve been calling it pretty evenly on both sides…which is as little as possible for most of the series (excluding game 5). penalties have been 18-12, excluding penalties that were at the very end of games & didn’t matter. and that 6 penalty difference came in game 5…where we took 3 more penalties than the red wings after the score was 5-0.
yeah, there were a lot of things i thought should’ve been called against the red wings this past game, but i bet Detroit fans have a list just as long as i do with “shoulda been” calls on us.
I’m not blaming every loss on officiating. Game 1 was a fairly called game, and game 5 was about the Pens playing poorly (i.e., they still would have lost a fairly called game). The only game I had a problem with was game 2; after about 20 seasons I’ve seen enough games to know when something isn’t quite right.
As far as conspiracy theories, I like Bill Simmons’ theory about NBA officiating. That is, in situations when it would be beneficial to the league if the home team won, the league sends out officials who have a pattern of being swayed by home-crowd sentiment.
P is for Latrobe.
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 4:22 PM EDT up reply actions
going by your logic though, they’ve probably sent out officials favorable to us as well when we were home. thus, evening it up in that way
Assuming they wanted us to win our home games. I’m not convinced that the NHL is particularly fond of the Penguins. I remember the details from item 4 in my post too well for that.
P is for Latrobe.
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 5:00 PM EDT up reply actions
sigh
they may not be fond of pittsburgh, but why would they hate the penguins? what motivation would they have for trying to rob us of a stanley cup? you honestly can’t say (without qualifying it somehow) that the nhl is out to get us in this series, or that the officials have been against us the entire time. its far more reasonable and probable to believe any missed/poor calls were due to crappy officiating or officials trying to “let the players play”
I don’t think it’s so much that they hate the Penguins, as that they LOVE the Original Six ©, and that they really, really like large markets, neither of which we are.
Put it this way. If you’re an Original Six team, or a team in another big market, you face no special obstacles to your success. If not, you may face some obstacles. Now, those obstacles may not be enough. When the Pens played the Bruins in the 1991 conference finals, or when they played DC, New York, Boston and Chicago in 1992, the fact of the matter was that the Pens were massively better than any team they played. This time around, though, the Penguins are an even match for the Red Wings; they are not clearly better than Detroit. We can’t beat both the Wings and the officials. Hence why I ask for an evenly-called game 7: if the Wings beat us straight-up in that game, that’s okay by me. Nowhere on this site will you read me questioning the refs in last year’s Finals: we got beat, legitimately, and that was that.
Put it another way. No one threatened to pull the Blackhawks out of Chicago, even during the darkest days of Dollar Bill Wirtz. And no one is threatening to pull teams out of places like LA no matter how bad things get. Yet places like Quebec, Winnipeg and Hartford, who LOVED their teams, had them taken away, and most people in Pittsburgh have no idea how close they came to losing their team as well. Pittsburgh isn’t a community or a fanbase to the NHL; we’re a cash register; and the league treats us like one. And if the Pens have to kill off 119 penalties in game 7, I’ll be hearing the message loud and clear.
P is for Latrobe.
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 8:55 PM EDT up reply actions
Why not...
….make a point in your post about drafting Fluery, Crosby, Malkin, Staal? Without those 4 draft picks, the two playoff runs do not happen.
WE ARE.......PENN STATE!
I had to write that in about 20 minutes during my lunch break at work. There are so many points like that to make. I suppose we were fortunate to be a terrible team at the right time; i.e., having high draft picks when Fleury, Malkin, and Staal became available. And lucking into the Crosby pick. But back then the team was so bad we didn’t know where it would lead. Don’t forget that Crosby’s (and Fleury’s) rookie year was one of the most miserable, disappointing seasons in recent memory for Pens fans. It wasn’t until last year that most of us saw the potential of the squad as a whole.
P is for Latrobe.
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 8:59 PM EDT up reply actions
I also didn’t have time to say anything about Lemieux’s return from retirement, including that amazing first night back against the Leafs. Or about the playoff “runs” in 1996 or 2001. I guess, for me, those “runs” were, more than anything, symptomatic of how that era of the Pens ultimately fell short of potential.
P is for Latrobe.
by holiday park on Jun 10, 2009 9:03 PM EDT up reply actions
Let us also not forget about the 99 playoffs when Jagr, I know it is sinful to give that guy credit now-a-days, carried the Pens in games 6 and 7, on a groin he couldn’t walk on, to beat the Devils in their opening round series. That season had Jagr as the only guy left from the Cup years, no Lemieux, Francis, Ulf, Murphy, Mullen, Barrasso, etc.
That was the best Jagr played and the one moment when he really became the face of the franchise, putting the memory of Lemieux to bed at least for another season and a half.
I got the 10 greatest games in Penguin history for Christmas 2 years ago and was shocked by the fact that Game 7 of that series did not make it. That’s just plane wrong.
Life is about one simple choice, get busy living or get busy dying
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