The Pittsburgh Penguins honored their 2016 Stanley Cup Championship team on Saturday at PPG Paints Arena. Even as tears welled in Sidney Crosby’s and Marc-Andre Fleury’s eyes, many of the highlights featured iconic calls from the late, great Mike Lange, and watching those clips gave me a sense of nostalgia for all of those great radio calls.

They got me thinking about the history of the Penguins on local radio. It is a long and interesting journey up and down the radio dial that has evolved into one of the largest radio networks in the NHL today.

In looking back on the history of the Penguins’ radio broadcast, their flagship station has had more homes than Sidney Crosby has had linemates. In the early days of the franchise, AM radio was where Penguins fans had to go to hear their favorite team. The team called the former WTAE, 1250 AM home for the first two seasons of its existence, with Ed Conway doing play-by-play in the team’s inaugural season, followed by Beckley Smith performing the duties for the 1968-69 season.

The Penguins returned to those airwaves over two decades later for the 1993-94 season, with Doug McCleod providing the play-by-play. Unbeknownst to most Pittsburghers, 1250 AM is still on the air today as WPGP, a talk station with mostly syndicated programming.

In the Penguins’ third season, the team found what would be a very temporary home at 1080 AM WEEP (now WWNL, a Christian talk station). The team also switched play-by-play announcers again, with Bill Hamilton now on the call.

It was in the team’s fourth season, 1970-71, that the team finally found a stable home and a consistent play-by-play announcer. It was that season the team moved to the powerful 50,000-watt 1020 AM, KDKA, as its flagship station and also hired Jim Forney, who would do play-by-play for the next three seasons. The Penguins stayed with KDKA for eight of the next nine seasons.

However, for the 1973-74 season, Forney was out, and the Penguins brought in Joe Starkey; no, not the Joe Starkey heard on 93.7 FM today, but rather the Joe Starkey who called the famous 1982 Cal versus Stanford, “The band is out on the field!” game. He only lasted one season as the voice of the Penguins, but the very next season, Lange arrived in town and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Penguins continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with KDKA over the next two decades. They broadcast their games on KDKA in three different stints, the 1970-71 season through the 1974-75 season, 1976-77 through 1978-79, and finally 1984-85 through 1992-93. Sprinkled in during that time were two stints on KQV 1410 AM, the 1975-76 season and then again from the 1981-82 season through the 1983-84 season.

The team then moved back to 1250 AM, WTAE 1993-94 through 1996-97, which would be the last season the Penguins’ flagship would be on the AM dial.

The Penguins were ahead of their time in broadcasting their games on an FM station when they joined forces with WWSW (3WS) for the 1979-80 season. That experiment lasted only two seasons, but much like KDKA, WTAE, and KQV, the Penguins had a second stint with 3WS many years later.

WTAE’s run ended, along with the first part of Mario Lemieux’s career, in the spring of 1997. The following season, the Penguins returned to the FM dial for good, but not with 3WS, rather its sister station, the famous 102.5 WDVE. That relationship lasted just two seasons before the Penguins reunited with 3WS for the 1999-00 season through the 2005-06 season (and where our own Dan Kingerski first came into contact with the team).

To begin the 2006-07 season, the Penguins moved down the (then) Forever Broadcasting hall again, this time to WDVE’s brother station 105.9 FM, WXDX. And after a little bit of a messy removal of Lange from the TV calls, the move also signaled the return of Lange to Penguins radio broadcasts. It had been 12 years since he’d done radio play-by-play. During that time, Doug McLeod, Matt McConnell, and Paul Steigerwald, respectively, took over the radio play-by-play duties while Lange took control of the television play-by-play.

With the move to WXDX, Lange and Steigerwald ended up flip-flopping their roles as the television and radio announcers. Following Lange’s retirement in 2021, Josh Getzoff took over, with Steve Mears having a one-year stint in the radio booth for the 2023-24 season, when Getzoff moved to television.

And finally, Joe Brand took over for Mears when Mears left to take the television play-by-play role with the Columbus Blue Jackets.

The Penguins seem to have found a permanent flagship home at WXDX. Their radio network is one of the largest in the NHL, with 30 stations, covering four states. When the radio network was modestly broadcasting on 1080 AM in those pre-Mario days, it would have been hard to imagine that the Penguins’ radio network would swell to the size that it is today

Today’s broadcast team of Brand, Phil Bourque, Paul Steigerwald, Brian Metzer, Pierre McGuire, Michelle Crechiolo, Colby Armstrong, and Executive Producer Jacob Lassner, along with an army of others behind the scenes, continues to carry on the Penguins radio network legacy.

Oh, I’ll be cowkicked.

Tags: Mike Lange Paul Steigerwald Penguins History penguins radio network

Categorized:Penguins History