Sunday, October 05, 2003

By Dejan Kovacevic, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

The Montreal Canadiens have a dozen players from Quebec. The Toronto Maple Leafs have six players from Ontario. The Boston Bruins have three players from Massachusetts. Even the Washington Capitals have a player from Maryland.

Now, finally, 36 years after the franchise was born, there will be a Penguin from Pittsburgh.

When the team is introduced to the crowd at Mellon Arena Friday, Ryan Malone will be the first to don the home sweater in his hometown. Actually, as someone born in Peters Township and raised in Upper St. Clair, he will be the first player born and trained in the Pittsburgh area to play for any NHL team.

He could not be more eager.

"I think about it all the time, just hearing my name and skating out there," he said. "I get goosebumps just thinking about it. I can't wait."

But Malone's shining moment also should bring this question:

What took so long?

Not for Malone. For anyone.

The answer requires going back more than a century.

Total Hockey, the sport's most comprehensive authority, credits the game's first fully professional league as having been established here in Pittsburgh, at the old Duquesne Gardens in Oakland. It was called the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League, and it had two great lures: One was an indoor rink featuring artificial ice, a rarity in that era. The other was that the league was so competitive it was paying top talent from Canada to come south. The league became stocked with so many elite players that it rapidly reached the point it was considered the best in the United States, maybe the best on the continent.

The surge was quelled within a decade, though, when Canadian leagues abandoned amateur status and paid to keep their own.

The NHL, in its eighth season, awarded Pittsburgh a franchise in 1925, unimaginatively called the Pirates. (Hey, the Steelers once were called the Pirates, too.) But they failed after five years mostly because of poor on-ice performance and moved to Philadelphia. That opened the door for the AHL's Hornets, who began playing at the Gardens in 1936 and became a fixture.

For most of that time, Pittsburgh continued to have a reputation for competitive amateur hockey. But that came to a halt in 1956 with the demolition of the Gardens. There was a hockey void in the city for five years before the Hornets returned in the new Civic Arena in 1961.

That, some from that era believe, was the biggest blow. Grassroots hockey stagnated, with less than a handful of quality places to play and no team to create an identity.

The Penguins were born in 1967, but the community was slow to adopt them. The Hornets had won the Calder Cup the previous season, and some saw an NHL expansion team as a downgrade. Although the Penguins caught on with good teams in the 1970s and stars such as Pierre Larouche and Jean Pronovost, that did not dip to the amateur level. The colossal success of the Steelers and Pirates that decade had children playing football and baseball.

The Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League was born in 1970, a first for local high schools, but it was slow to grow. It started out with seven teams and, 15 years later, had expanded to only 30, a fraction of the number of schools. There were five major rinks in the area when the WPIHL started, less than double that 15 years later.

Everything changed with Mario Lemieux's arrival in 1984 and the Penguins' Stanley Cups in 1991-92.

Today, there are, poetically enough, 66 teams in what is known as the PIHL, and the league uses 25 rinks for its games. There are hundreds of children playing in amateur, elite and travel programs.

And now, finally, one made it.

So, what took so long?

"I can't say that, but I can say that having Mario and the team winning the Stanley Cups had a huge impact on all of us in Pittsburgh," Malone said. "That's when you saw the first generation of guys my age making it to Division I colleges. And that was a big deal, you know? I remember a friend making it to the Hockey Night in Boston tournament or someone else going Junior B or Division III, and we would all think it was a really big deal. Now, you see all the rinks, the new ones in Neville Island and Bethel and Harmarville. All the new teams, too. It's just unbelievable. Girls' teams, too."

That volume of competition, Malone said, is the key. The next phase, he added, will be the belief.

"When I was a kid, we didn't think about playing in the NHL because nobody from here does that. But when you see somebody there ... maybe you think you can do it, too."

Icy chips

The Penguins are not the only ones who might be looking to break the mold for first-round picks in their dealings with Marc-Andre Fleury. The Florida Panthers have informed the agents for 2003 first-rounders Nathan Horton and Anthony Stewart and 2002 first-rounder Petr Taticek that they are ignoring precedents. General manager Rick Dudley told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel he is confident the NHL's new Collective Bargaining Agreement will change rookie contracts and, as a result, he feels no pressure to sign anyone. "You look at some contracts and see the potential bonus earnings of a young player who never played a game of pro," Dudley said. "All he has to do is fall off his bicycle, and he gets $2 million in bonuses. It ain't happening. That I can promise you. Those days are over, at least as far as the Florida Panthers are concerned."

The Carolina Hurricanes are leaning toward keeping Eric Staal, the talented center drafted right after Fleury. They like him enough that they are entertaining the idea of having Ron Francis move to the left wing to skate with him.

Robert Dome, the Penguins' first-rounder in 1997 still trying to find work in the NHL, is close to doing so in Calgary. He has been among the Flames' top scorers in the preseason with three goals and five assists in five games, with at least one point in each.

Alexandre Daigle is back. Again. Only this time without an NHL-only contract such as the one for $700,000 the Penguins gave him last season. The Minnesota Wild signed him Tuesday to a one-year, two-way contract worth $500,000 in the NHL, less than $100,000 in the AHL. Jacques Lemaire told the Minneapolis Star Tribune the contract does not necessarily mean Daigle made the team: "He can improve the game he's playing. He's doing OK. I want to see more."

While most teams, including the Penguins, are playing the trap, the Colorado Avalanche is planning to play it wide-open. That drew an endorsement from Lemieux: "They can do it. You look at the lineup they have, it's pretty frightening to see some of the guys they have up front ... Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic, Paul Kariya, Teemu Selanne. You can go on and on. Their defense is right up there with the best in the league. If there's a team that can do it, they're the ones."

The Los Angeles Kings figure to show up at Mellon Arena with a defense in worse shape than the home team. Brad Norton's arm was lacerated Tuesday to such a degree he will miss three months. Aaron Miller is week to week with a fractured wrist, Jaroslav Modry is just coming back from shoulder surgery, Denis Grebeshkov has an arm injury, and Maxim Kuznetsov is in Russia because of visa trouble.

Only five days until the puck drops between Lemieux and Jason Allison.

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