PENGUINS STRIKE BACK
The Penguins got just one past Senators goaltender Craig Anderson on Monday night. Bruce Deachman, meanwhile, discovers a long Ottawa-Pittsburgh history.
Although the Pittsburgh Penguins were among the NHL’s first expansion teams when the league doubled in size from the so-called Original Six in 1967, the Steel City’s NHL roots go much further back. Pittsburgh’s first NHL team, the Pirates, were regular opponents of the first incarnation of the Senators, including the 1927 squad that claimed Ottawa’s most recent Stanley Cup.
While the two never faced one another in the playoffs, Ottawa’s connection to the club was undeniable. Ten of the 34 players to skate for the Pirates between 1925 and 1930 were from the Ottawa area, while an 11th served in the House of Commons and died in Ottawa.
By awarding Pittsburgh a franchise in 1925, NHL president Frank Calder hoped to prevent the formation of a rival league by Eddie Livingstone, former owner of the National Hockey Association’s Toronto Shamrocks and Blueshirts.
Calder’s plan worked, although it was Ottawa Senators owner Frank Ahearn who almost scuttled the deal. According to Pittsburgh hockey historian and pittsburghhockey.net web manager Jim Kubus, the Senators opposed the Pittsburgh franchise for two reasons.
One, they argued that twothirds of the nascent Pirates players would be amateurs from the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets, then champions of the United States Amateur Hockey Association, and thus not ready for prime-time professional hockey. Second, they opposed expansion into larger American cities, fearing it would put teams on uneven financial — and thus competitive — footings.
But Ottawa dropped its opposition on Nov. 7, 1925, and Pittsburgh was awarded its franchise the same day.
“A lot of people are surprised to know about the history here,” Kubus says. “There are some in this region for whom hockey never existed before Sidney Crosby. And then there are a slew of people for whom hockey never existed before (Mario) Lemieux.
“But we can go back more than 80 years to the origin of the game.”
In favour of Pittsburgh’s NHL bid, Kubus notes, was Duquesne Gardens. Opened in 1899, it was the first rink in North America to have refrigerated ice. “They could start their leagues a month-and-a-half to two months before any of the Canadian leagues really got going,” he said.
Incidentally, Duquesne was also the first rink to use shatterproof “Herculite” glass above the dasher boards — chicken wire was used in most NHL cities — and notably, although much later, was an early proponent of good ice when it acquired Zamboni Ice Machine No. 4.
And Pittsburgh, Kubus adds, had already laid claim to the first official professional hockey game, with the International Professional Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Pros hosting the newly formed league’s first game in 1904.
But on Nov. 26, 1925, Pirates captain Lionel Conacher — known as The Big Train and one of only two men today with their names engraved on both the Stanley and Grey Cups — and goalie Roy “Shrimp” Worters — who, at only 5’ 3”, is the shortest person to ever play in the NHL — stepped onto the Boston Arena ice for Pittsburgh’s first NHL game, against the Bruins. Aptly, Conacher scored the Pirates’ first goal, while Ottawa-born Harold Darragh notched the gamewinner, with the visitors prevailing 2-1.
The Pirates’ second game, two nights later, featured some more dramatic history when they faced Howie Morenz and the Canadiens, with near-legendary keeper Georges Vezina in goal for the Habs. Vezina, who had lost 35 pounds in the previous six weeks and was playing with a fever of 102 F, started vomiting blood during the first intermission. He returned to his net to start the second period but collapsed on the ice and had to be replaced. He never played again. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis the following day, and died three months later.
The Pirates made history again a month later, in a 3-1 Boxing Day loss to the New York Americans at Madison Square Gardens, when Worters and New York netminder Jake Forbes faced 141 shots between them (Worters: 73, Forbes: 68). It’s an NHL record that still stands.
The “Smoketown Sextet,” as the local Pittsburgh Press dubbed them, finished their rookie season with a 19-16-1 third-place finish, good enough to make the playoffs, where they dropped a two-game total-goals series against the Montreal Maroons, who eventually won the Stanley Cup.
A total of 34 players donned the Pirates’ black and gold, making Ottawa’s contribution of 10 all the more remarkable (In 1980, incidentally, when the Penguins switched their sweater colours from blue and white to black and gold, the Boston Bruins complained, arguing they had the colours first. The Pens, though, successfully countered that the Pirates’ use of the colours predated the Bruins’).
Notable among the Ottawa 10 was Eardley’s Hubert “Hib” Milks, who scored 70 goals with Pittsburgh and finished his NHL career in 1933 with the Ottawa Senators.
Darragh won a Stanley Cup with Toronto in 1932, was the team’s last surviving player. He died in 1993.
And Conacher, who later won Stanley Cups with the Chicago Blackhawks and Montreal Maroons, and was chosen as Canada’s top athlete of the half-century, came to Ottawa as a Liberal member of Parliament, representing Toronto’s Trinity riding. He died in 1954 when, in a friendly softball game between MPs and the press gallery, he suffered a heart attack stretching a single into a triple.
Following their inaugural season, meanwhile, the Pirates only returned to the playoffs once, in 1928, when the Americans defeated them by a two-game score of 6-4. The following year, they won just nine of 44 games, yet somehow managed to fare even more poorly in their final season, with just five wins and three ties against 36 losses. The team was relocated to Philadelphia for a few years before folding.
Goalie Joe Miller, from Morrisburg, played for Pittsburgh in those two final years. It’s worth noting that of his 14 wins for the team, 11 were by shutout, and his goals-against average was 2.87.
But the Pirates had a few moments of historic significance, including coach Odie Cleghorn being the first to change players on the fly and the first to use set lines, when most teams simply iced their best players for as long as they could last, often the entire game.
“But they were a bad team,” Kubus says. “An asterisk. And the truth of the matter is that even when they were here they weren’t supported or beloved by the folks who lived here.
“I don’t think anybody missed them when they went away.”