The Pittsburgh Penguins were the best team in the NHL during the 1992–93 regular season. Their 56 wins and 119 points earned them the Presidents' Trophy's as the League's top team. Six players reached the 85-point plateau and eight reached the 22-goal plateau. Despite missing over a quarter of the regular season due to Hodgkin's Disease, Mario Lemieux returned later in the year to help the Penguins put together a 17-game winning streak, an NHL record still standing today.
The Penguins began a process of rebranding the team under previous owner Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr., culminating in a new logo and uniforms for the 1992–93 season. The Pittsburgh design firm Vance Wright Adams was hired to create the new look, and went through many design variations which included options of changing the Penguins' shade of gold to a metallic gold, a color that would eventually be adopted by the team as Vegas gold in 2000.
The final logo featured the bust of a left-facing penguin, drawn in a stylized but more realistic style compared to the cartoony skating penguin of the previous logo. The penguin's wing is stylized into the shape of a striped triangle, and the body and wing are part of a triangle that is completed by a Pittsburgh gold field to the left of the chest, tying the new logo back to the original and its reference to Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle. Fans would come to refer to the new logo as either the "robo-penguin" (or "robopen" for short) or the "pigeon".
The new uniform designs came down to two sets of finalists - one set featuring the new logo on the front, with pointed yellow shoulders, and the other featuring the logo on the shoulders and diagonal text across the front, recalling the "PITTSBURGH" that appeared across the Penguins' inaugural uniforms, with "PENGUINS" on the white home jersey and "PITTSBURGH" on the black road jersey. The waist and sleeve striping would end up being identical on the final versions of both sets, with the black jerseys' waist stripes being identical to the outgoing jersey's design of a thick white stripe over a thick gold stripe with a thin black stripe in between; the white jerseys featured matching stripes that reversed the black and white stripes. The sleeve stripes were arranged diagonally, pointing downward from the sleeve numbers to the cuff.
The Penguins sought permission to use both sets of jerseys, but were denied by the NHL, so the team opted to split the difference, adopting the white home jersey featuring the logo on front and the black road jersey featuring the diagonal "PITTSBURGH" text. Three decades later, when Adidas and the NHL introduced the Reverse Retro jersey program, the Penguins' retro jerseys would recall the unused prototypes from this redesign, with their 2020–21 uniforms resembling the unused white jersey with some changes, while the 2022–23 uniforms being a straight recreation of the unused black jersey, adapted to the Adizero jersey template.
Pittsburgh allowed the most short-handed goals (19) during the regular season of all 24 teams.[1] In addition to tying the Buffalo Sabres for most hat-tricks during the regular season, with ten, the Penguins finished second in shooting percentage, scoring 367 goals on 2,725 shots (13.5%).[2] The Penguins also achieved a feat of 3 goals in 29 seconds during a home game on January 26, 1993.
It was announced during the regular season that Mario Lemieux had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease. Despite missing 24 regular season games and the 1993 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal on February 6, 1993, Lemieux led the League in plus-minus with +55 and led in scoring with 160 points (a total for which he would win the Art Ross Trophy). At the pace he was scoring goals (1.15 per game) and earning up assists (1.52 per game). In recognition of his dedication and his achievements, Lemieux was awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL's MVP during the regular season.
[3]Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against
Note: Teams that qualified for the playoffs are highlighted in bold.
p – Won Presidents' Trophy (and division)
Divisions: PTK – Patrick, ADM – Adams
bold – Qualified for playoffs
The Devils had been a struggling team prior to the 1992–93 season, and in the first round of the playoffs, they met the Presidents' Trophy winners from Pittsburgh. The Penguins entered the series on an 11-game playoff winning streak, which they extended to a record 14 games in this series.
The Isles' improbable upset of the Penguins was capped off by David Volek's series-winning goal at 5:16 of overtime in Game 7.
†Denotes player spent time with another team before joining the Penguins. Stats reflect time with the Penguins only.
‡Denotes player was traded mid-season. Stats reflect time with the Penguins only.
The Penguins were involved in the following transactions during the 1992–93 season:[9]
Pittsburgh Penguins' picks at the 1992 NHL Entry Draft.[10]
The Cleveland Lumberjacks relocated from Muskegon for the 1992–93 season. They finished second in the International Hockey League (IHL)'s Atlantic Division which earned them a playoff spot. They lost in the first round of the playoffs to the eventual Turner Cup champion Fort Wayne Komets.