It is the Twenty-Year Anniversary of the Most Ridiculous Night of Mario Lemieux's Career

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Aaron Itovitch
February 7, 2023 (8:14 PM)

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Thinking of the prototypical tough-guy in the league today, guys like Milan Lucic and Ryan Reaves come to mind.

At this very moment, Canadiens blueliner Arber Xhekaj leads the league in penalty minutes. He is closely followed by Philadelphia fourth-line grinder Nic Deslauriers.

Going back twenty years, a player managed to put up 29 penalty minutes in one post-whistle scrum. If this were done by some replacement-level player it wouldn't be remembered, but the player who accumulated those PIMs was none other than Mario Lemieux.

With all due respect to Xhekaj and Deslauriers, neither of them will ever have a 150-point season, and it's likely neither of them will even have a 29-PIM night.

On an episode of Frank Seravalli's The Daily Faceoff Live, Mike McKenna shared the story of this crazy night:

Twenty years ago Monday � my friend Kurt Hardley pointed this out on Twitter � Mario Lemieux went crazy in a game. He got 29 penalty minutes in one stoppage of play. It reads slashing, instigator, fighting misconduct, game misconduct. The game was a whole shemozzle. There's YouTube of it. There's fights. There's things everywhere.

But what ended up happening was Brad Ference, who I played with in Omaha in the American Hockey League for the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights, we called him Bitsy, because he was so bitter all the time. Well, Bitsy drove everybody bananas, former first-round pick, and Lemieux had had enough of him. They already had an altercation about four minutes before, and they came across the blue line, Lemieux two-hands him and then goes after him.

The best part is Mike Keenan coaching the Florida Panthers, the Panthers are up 6-0 so obviously the Pittsburgh Penguins are pretty angry; the captain Super Mario's making a point. But Mario had 29 penalty minutes in this game, and the entire season that year had 43 PIMs. So, he took three-quarters of all his penalty minutes in one game, because Brad Ference drove him over the edge.

Seravalli responded as such:

Two things. One, I would say that Bitsy is an incredible nickname, and I feel like it might stick in my house for me. And two, if you look at Mario Lemieux, he did have one season of 100 penalty minutes back in the same year, 1988-89, that he had 199 points, which is kind of bananas. I just think when you're a player of that ilk, you're just like, «Come on pigeon, get away from me.» You don't need the extracurriculars, so I love that he got fired up enough to take matters into his own hands.

The episode wrapped up with this:

Imagine Connor McDavid doing that, or Auston Matthews just beating the wheels off someone. It just doesn't happen anymore.

Imagine a superstar, let alone an NHL-tough guy doing what Lemieux did that night. He truly was one of a kind!

Source: Yardbarker