In the fall of 1987, as the Penguins hit the quarter pole of their fourth season with Mario Lemieux, the stark reality was that they hadn’t made much progress toward becoming a Stanley Cup contender. The Penguins were still searching for their first playoff berth since 1982, and winning only seven of their first 21 games suggested the off-season hiring of coach Pierre Creamer wasn’t the answer.
General manager Eddie Johnston had other ideas for change, and he pursued none with as much ardor as obtaining a player he knew could make the Penguins a dramatically different team. In late November, defenseman Paul Coffey, an integral part of the burgeoning Edmonton Oilers dynasty that had produced three Cups in four seasons, was still without a contract from Oilers’ GM Glen Sather.
Already a dominant team, Edmonton was interested in younger players who might help sustain its lofty status in the coming years. Johnston finally packaged two of his recent first-round picks – 1985 No. 2 overall choice Craig Simpson and 1987 No. 5 overall choice Chris Joseph – with veterans Moe Mantha and Dave Hannan, and that brought Coffey to Pittsburgh and altered the hockey landscape here.
“For me, it was confirmation that the Penguins were going to make a push to win the Stanley Cup,” remembers Bob Errey, a left winger who was drafted the year before Lemieux and who would be around for both Stanley Cup championships that were on the horizon in the late 1980s. “We were so far from a Stanley Cup. Obviously, we had Mario, but we didn’t have any real stars behind him before Paul came here.”
Arriving with Dave Hunter and Wayne Van Dorp on Nov. 24, the 26-year-old Coffey provided not only breathtaking offensive skills but leadership that helped the Penguins become champions. That’s why tonight he becomes the eighth player to be inducted into the Penguins Hall of Fame.
“I had a chance to play with Paul at the ’87 Canada Cup, so I knew what he could bring to our team,” remembers Lemieux. “He was one of the greatest skaters and greatest offensive defenseman in NHL history, but he brought more than talent to Pittsburgh. He also brought a winning tradition and a winning attitude.
“He’d won three Stanley Cups and two Canada Cups before he came to the Penguins, and that kind of experience and leadership meant a lot as we were building our young team. He was a very important piece of the puzzle.”
Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2004, Coffey is the second-highest scoring defenseman in NHL history with 1,531 points. In 1985-86, he surpassed Bobby Orr’s mark by establishing the NHL single-season record for goals by a defenseman (48) and came within a single point of matching Orr’s single-season record for points (139).
It didn’t take long for Coffey, one of the quickest and most effortless skaters in NHL history, to make his presence felt in Pittsburgh. The day after the trade, in a Thanksgiving Eve home game against Quebec, he had three assists as the Penguins rallied from a 4-0 deficit late in the second period to earn a 6-4 victory.
“I remember that game like it was yesterday,” says Coffey. “My first assist, the puck came back to the point and I took a shot and somebody tipped it in. I had no idea who anybody on our team was. I remember patting guys on the back, and I had to turn the guy around to see who it was, and it was Dave McLlwain.
“It was an exciting time for me. It’s one of the best cities I ever had a chance to play in, and I have some real fond memories.”
But Coffey also knew there would be bumps in the road. One week after that dramatic victory – one of the greatest comebacks in team history – the Penguins were thumped at home by the New York Islanders, 7-1.
“I’ve got to be honest with you. The first week into it,” Coffey says, “I remember saying to myself, ‘Oh my God, what have I got myself into?’ But anybody with any hockey brains could see that having a guy like Mario on the team, seeing him getting better day in and day out, with his leadership skills growing, that good things were going to happen. And they did.”
Coffey had joined Lemieux in the 1987 Canada Cup two months earlier, and he fully understood what that event meant to Lemieux’s maturation as a player.
“That was pretty much Mario’s coming out party, getting a chance to play with Wayne (Gretzky) and seeing first-hand what it took day in and day out to be a great player, which Mario was going to be,” said Coffey. “When I heard the trade to Pittsburgh might happen through EJ, and getting a chance to play with a guy with a similar style to Wayne, it was a bit of a no-brainer for myself.”
Teams that were struggling to defend Lemieux now had a bigger problem: trying to keep one eye on him and one eye on Coffey joining the rush or bringing the puck from deep in his zone. Coffey surpassed 100 points in each of his first two full seasons with the Penguins and still holds the team single-season records for goals (30), assists (83), points (113), shots (342), power-play assists (53) and power-play points (64) by a defenseman.
“You didn’t have to make three passes to get the puck into the other zone; you just gave it to Paul,” said Errey. “If the rules were the way they are today, I don’t know how anybody would have ever stopped him. His speed was all generated in the first 15 feet in his own zone, and you would see him just gliding by guys after that.”
But if Coffey brought special skills to the Penguins, he also brought intangibles that make the difference between a good team and a great team.
“He was probably the most exciting defenseman to ever play for the Penguins,” says television play-by-play man Paul Steigerwald. “But more than that, he brought a winning attitude to the team. The Penguins hadn’t made the playoffs in the Lemieux era, and we needed an injection of that winning attitude.
“Edmonton always was noted for their swagger, almost being cocky, and Coffey brought that cockiness to our locker room at just the right time when we needed to take that next step forward.”
Teammate Phil Bourque saw the work that went into making Coffey the finely-tuned athlete he was, and he was convinced the rest of the team benefited from it.
“The way he prepared for a game was incredible, the way he never really took a practice off,” Bourque said. “What lot of people don’t know is that he was a conditioning freak, in the weight room all the time, on the bike after games. You’d see two or three guys in the weight room after the game, which was unheard of back then, and then the next thing you know it’s four or five, then eight or nine.
“I really believe that paid big dividends come late May and late in the playoffs when we had another gear to get to, and it had a lot to do with the conditioning we did, which really was all generated from work ethic of Paul Coffey.”
When the Penguins finally did reach the playoffs in the spring of 1989, Coffey’s leadership was instrumental in their success. He scored two goals in Game 1 of the opening-round series against the New York Rangers, including the game-winner with less than 10 minutes to play, and had nine points in a four-game sweep.
During the Penguins’ run to their first Cup in the spring of 1991, Coffey had four points in a critical 7-6 overtime win over Washington in Game 2 of the Patrick Division Finals, a game in which he also suffered a broken jaw. But he returned in the Finals to help beat the Minnesota North Stars in six games.
When Coffey was traded to Los Angeles in February, 1992, rumors of a deal that would be announced the next day were heard throughout the Arena during a 7-1 victory over Toronto. When the game was over, Coffey went into GM Craig Patrick’s office.
“We had a nice chat,” Coffey recalled. “He told me what happened. I sat back, went into the locker room, looked around and got a real emotional and warm, you know, fuzzy feeling in my body. I just put a pair of shorts on, put a pair of skates on and went out for a couple laps around the arena, a couple of mock rushes coming behind the net, thinking about all the things, the excitement, that town and that arena gave me.”
The feeling, Pittsburgh fans will tell you, was mutual.
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