Eighteen years ago today, the Pittsburgh Penguins punched their ticket to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 1992.<\/p>\n
The Penguins, full of a mix of youth and grizzly veterans, had made their return to the postseason a year prior, quickly dispatched in five games by the Ottawa Senators<\/a>.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Now a year later, Pittsburgh had seemed to have learned a lot from their loss, storming through the 2008 Stanley Cup Playoffs with a 4-0 sweep of the Ottawa Senators and a 4-1 series win against the New York Rangers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Up next were the Penguins\u2019 cross-state rivals from Philadelphia, but the series shifted heavily towards Pittsburgh from the start.<\/p>\n The Flyers held off being eliminated in Game 4, but all things went Pittsburgh\u2019s way in Game 5 at the Mellon Arena.<\/p>\n Ryan Malone scored twice along with goals from Evgeni Malkin<\/a>, Marian Hossa<\/a>, Jordan Staal<\/a>, and Pascal Dupuis<\/a> as the Penguins cruised to the Stanley Cup Final with a 6-0 win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eighteen years ago today, the Pittsburgh Penguins punched their ticket to the Stanley Cup Final for the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[86846,81207,15355,66259,86845,86847,86844,86843,35293,10154,86849,4845,73,75,74,1067,86848,86842,8664,65734,62042,12444],"class_list":["post-195480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-2008-stanley-cup-playoffs","tag-eastern-conference-finals","tag-evgeni-malkin","tag-jordan-staal","tag-lasse-kukkonen","tag-marian-hossa","tag-martin-biron","tag-mellon-arena","tag-new-york-rangers","tag-ottawa-senators","tag-pascal-dupuis","tag-philadelphia-flyers","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-pittsburgh-penguins","tag-r-j-umberger","tag-ryan-malone","tag-sidney-crosby","tag-stanley-cup","tag-stanley-cup-final","tag-the-penguins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}