The New York Rangers weren’t always as hot as they are today.  In fact, they were an expansion team when they were first introduced.  In 1926, the New York team was the New York Americans, patterned in an American flag.  Madison Square Gardens was massive crowds showing up for their hockey games.  So massive, in fact, that the owners decided that there needed to be a second New York team, this time tied squarely to the Garden through ownership.

Being an expansion team, first impressions mattered.  So Madison Square Gardens hired the best coach they could find: Conn Smythe.  Smythe took a cross-country road trip to look for the best undiscovered players in the country.  Back in the 1920′s, there were still quite a few of those.  many of his choices ended up in the Hall of Fame, including Frank Boucher, Bill Cook and Ivan Johnson.

Unfortunately, due to a disagreement with management, Smythe left the team he crafted.  To take his place, Garden President G.I. “Tex” Rickard hired Lester Patrick.  Patrick later became one of hockey’s greats.  While Smythe was still seeking out fresh players, the media began referring to the as-yet unnamed team as ‘Tex’s Rangers,’ a play on the Texas Ranger.  The name stuck, and eventually Tex chose it as the team’s name.

The team was hot right out of the gate.  during their first year, they had the League’s top scorer–Bill Cook–and had the best record in the NHL.  The next year was even better for them, when they won the Stanley Cup.  Their success rocked the Americans to their core, and the club finally shut down in 1941.  Meanwhile, the Rangers continued their remarkable stretch of wins.  In their first 16 seasons, the team failed to reach the playoffs only once, And only twice in that time did they sink below third.  Not bad for a team that started out as an expansion.

To this day Madison Square Gardens remains the home stadium of the New York Rangers.  The Rangers have been good to the Garden, bringing in record crowds and plenty of fame.  Now Madison Square Garden is as recognizable as any of New York’s famous landmarks, and it is largely thanks to the Rangers.  The Rangers have a number of traditions, but chief among them was the Chief.  The Chief was a man who ran around the stadium dressed with an Indian feather headdress with his face painted in Rangers colors.  The Chief, otherwise known as Robert Comas, did this from 1971 to 1995, when the Rangers again won the Stanley Cup.

Each time a gold is scored on their home field, a fire engine’s horn blares three times,  then the goal song titled ‘Slapshot’ is played.  The Rangers also do something that is fairly uncommon among the NHL: they salute the crowd.  After the team wins in their home stadium, they come together at the center of the ice and raise their sticks high in the air.  This is still a fairly new tradition, getting started in the 2005-2006 season.  The New York Rangers are one of the great teams of hockey.  Few other teams have the pedigree of the boys in red and blue.

Many fans will say that the Pittsburgh Penguins weren’t a hockey team until they met a talented young Canadian center named Mario Lemieux.  Lemieux played for the Penguins for seventeen non-consecutive seasons, from 1984 to 2006, and has widely been regarded as one of the greatest NHL players of all time.

As a player, Lemieux has a number of NHL records.  He played nine-hundred and fifteen total games for Pittsburgh Penguins.  Within that time, he scored six-hundred and ninety goals.  He also racked up an impressive 1033 assists, giving him a total of 1723 points with Pittsburgh Penguins.  During this time, his longest goal scoring streak got up to twelve, and his longest scored point streak reached a whopping forty-six games.  Lemieux’s record career high for goals per season was eighty-five, in the 1988-89 Season; in this same season he also set record career and league highs for points and assists, totaling one-hundred and ninety-nine and one hundred and fourteen respectively.  Most everyone agrees that 1988-89 was Lemieux’s best season, although it actually wasn’t a year when he won the Stanley Cup.

Awarding his hockey performance as a whole, the NHL inducted Mario Lemieux into its Hall of Fame in 1997.  In that same year, Lemieux retired, and the reason was cancer.  Amazingly, Lemieux performed for many years while struggling with his health.  In 1997 he retired to undergo treatment, which was successful and which allowed Lemieux to return to the league in 2000, after which he played for another six years.  Lemieux officially retired for the second time, then, in 2006, at the age of forty.  At this time, and in reference to Lemieux’s excellence, Wayne Gretzky, another hockey great, stated: “You don’t replace players like Mario Lemieux. The game will miss him.”  Bobby Orr, another legend, also remarked that Lemieux was “the most talented player [he’d] ever seen” play.

Lemieux has proven himself as more than just a hockey player, though.  Using the financial success his performance as an athlete afforded him, Lemieux actually bought the Penguins out of bankruptcy in 1999 and has been their co-owner ever since.  This meant that when Lemieux came out of retirement in 2000, he was actually both an owner and player of and for The Penguins.  This eventually led to Lemieux becoming the only person to have won a Stanley Cup as both a player and an owner.  This circumstance unfortunately also led to a bit corporate controversy, as in such a position Lemieux faced the potential of a conflict of interest situation, with respect to NHL labor negotiations.

Even off the ice, though, Lemieux has had affect.  In 1993, when Lemieux’s health began to wane and he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he started The Mario Lemieux Foundation, an organization formed to raise funding for medical research involving both Hodgkin’s lymphoma and various other forms of cancer.  Most recently, in 2007, Lemieux allied himself with many other high profile athletes, including Lance Armstrong and Andre Agassi, to form The Athletes for Hope, an organization involved in many charitable pursuits.