Pittsburgh has been an NHL city twice. Most fans only know about the second time.
The Pittsburgh Pirates played five seasons in the NHL, from 1925 to 1930. They were built from a championship amateur roster, coached by an innovator who changed how hockey lines work, and they were wiped out by the Great Depression before they ever had a chance to become something.
The Yellow Jackets: An Amateur Powerhouse
Before there were Pirates, there were the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets, an amateur team playing out of Duquesne Gardens. And they were fantastic.
The Yellow Jackets won back-to-back United States Amateur Hockey Association championships in 1924 and 1925. Their roster included Lionel Conacher, who would go on to be voted Canada's greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century, and Roy "Shrimp" Worters, one of the finest goaltenders of the era at 5-foot-3.
The NHL, expanding into American markets in the mid-1920s, saw a ready-made team. In 1925 the league granted Pittsburgh a franchise, and the entire Yellow Jackets roster turned professional overnight, taking the name Pirates after the city's baseball team.
Odie Cleghorn and the Line Change
The Pirates' first coach was Odie Cleghorn, a former NHL player and one of the most underappreciated innovators in hockey history.
Cleghorn is widely credited with introducing systematic line changes to professional hockey. Before him, teams played their best players until they were exhausted, changing personnel only when someone was hurt or completely spent. Cleghorn rotated three forward lines in regular shifts, keeping fresh legs on the ice at all times.
It worked. The Pirates finished third in the NHL in their debut season with a record of 19-16-1 and made the playoffs. For an expansion team of converted amateurs, it was a remarkable achievement.
Cleghorn also, in one famous 1925 game, served as a referee while coaching his own team. Different era.
Roy Worters and Lionel Conacher
The two stars of the Pirates deserve their own recognition.
Roy Worters was 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, and he was one of the best goaltenders in NHL history. He played with a wide, low stance that maximized his coverage and had reflexes that bordered on supernatural. He would go on to win the Hart Trophy as league MVP in 1929 with the New York Americans, the first goaltender ever to win it.
Lionel Conacher was a genuine multi-sport superstar. He played professional hockey, football, baseball, lacrosse, and boxed. He won the Grey Cup, the Stanley Cup (twice, after leaving Pittsburgh), and multiple championships in other sports. In 1950 he was voted Canada's greatest athlete of the half-century.
The Pirates had both of them. And they still could not survive.
The Crash
The Pirates' decline was financial before it was competitive.
Duquesne Gardens was old and small. Attendance was inconsistent. The team's owner, boxing promoter Benny Leonard, had financed the franchise with money that largely evaporated in the stock market crash of October 1929.
The 1929-30 season was a catastrophe: 5 wins, 36 losses, 3 ties. The team lost money on every game. Leonard was broke.
For the 1930-31 season the franchise relocated 40 miles away to Philadelphia and was renamed the Quakers. That lasted exactly one season before the franchise suspended operations permanently.
The NHL would not return to Pittsburgh until 1967, when the Penguins were founded as part of the league's great expansion.
The Legacy
**They brought the NHL to Pennsylvania.** Pittsburgh was the first Pennsylvania city with an NHL team, 42 years before the Penguins and 42 years before the Flyers.
**Odie Cleghorn's line changes changed hockey forever.** Every shift change in every game at every level of hockey today descends from what Cleghorn was doing in Pittsburgh in 1925.
**They were the first team built from an amateur championship roster.** The Yellow Jackets-to-Pirates pipeline was a template the NHL would use again in other expansion markets.
Five seasons. One playoff appearance. Two Hall of Famers. And a stock market crash that ended it all.
Pittsburgh Pirates Hockey 1925-1930 | Vintage Hockey T-Shirt – Odd Man Rush