Penguins 'honored' to be hub city finalist

PPG Paints Arena has been the site of some major hockey events during its first decade in existence.

Two Stanley Cup finals. An NHL draft. An NCAA Frozen Four.

But the one the Penguins are trying to convince the NHL to place there this summer will be unlike any that came before it.

And, the Penguins hope, unlike any that will follow for as long as the building stands.

They want the league to designate the arena as one of two NHL venues that will play host to games if the league is able to stage Stanley Cup playoffs this summer.

Commissioner Gary Bettman, whose league suspended operations March 12 because of the coronavirus pandemic, listed it as one of 10 remaining candidates Tuesday.

"We're honored to be a finalist,"said Penguins president and CEO David Morehouse, in a statement released by the team. "And we'd love to be chosen as one of the hub cities."

The Penguins don't figure to find out if that will happen for at least another three or four weeks, based on the timeframe Bettman has laid out.

"You never know at the end what their final criteria are going to be," said Tom McMillan, the team's vice president of communications. "But we feel good about it."

The other hub-city contenders are Columbus, Toronto, Las Vegas, Chicago, Dallas, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Vancouver.

"I'm sure there are a lot of strong bids out there," McMillan said.

The Penguins figure to have submitted a pretty impressive one of their own, however. Not only because of their experience at staging large events in conjunction with league personnel, but because of their relationship with UPMC.

"We thought, 'What better place to get this all started again than Pittsburgh?' " Morehouse said. "We've got an internationally renowned medical partner in UPMC to oversee health and safety protocols. We've got tremendous facilities in PPG Paints Arena and the UPMC Lemieux Sports complex (in Cranberry) that the NHL knows well because we hosted two Stanley Cups in recent years. We've got great support from the business community and our political leaders and, obviously, we think Pittsburgh's the best hockey town in the country."

The NHL has stressed the importance for frequent testing of players once competition begins, and team officials believe their strong ties to UPMC could be invaluable.

""We work arm-in-arm with them, anyway," McMillan said. "And obviously, we're connected with them up at the practice facility (in Cranberry), which is connected to a full medical facility, which we also thought was a huge asset."

McMillan added that political and business leaders did not hesitate to back their bid to make Pittsburgh a hub city.

"We got, from the start, tremendous support from the Allegheny Conference and the business community," he said. "Our bid included the list of the local organizing committee, which was pretty much every big CEO in the city. We were really encouraged ... because they all responded almost immediately. And it wasn't just, 'Yes.' It was, 'What can we do?'

"We were excited about the bid, and then we got more excited every time we talked to another company, to another CEO, to another political leader. They were so excited that it made us more excited. We didn't have to sell it to anybody.

"The more we put it together -- we had to do it really quickly, clearly -- the more we were convinced this would be the perfect place, across the board."