Fleury wanting to retire a Golden Knight makes Penguins fans sad
Pittsburgh’s favorite Flower said he wants to finish his career in Las Vegas, putting Penguins fans in a glass case of emotion.
Sorry Penguins fans, but it looks like another team picked your Flower.
The Las Vegas Golden Knights announced Friday that they signed goalie Marc-Andre Fleury to a three-year contract extension. NHL.com reported that the deal is worth $7 million annually for the three-time Stanley Cup champion.
The 33-year-old Fleury released a video where he said Vegas is his new home and he hopes to remain there as long as the Golden Knights will have him.
https://twitter.com/GoldenKnights/status/1017794856603680768
Penguins Twitter, predictably, did not take that news well:
The only news I want from Fleury is that he’s coming back to Pittsburgh ): https://t.co/gI9Nf1eFZy
— Gretchen Johnson (@gretchenj2332) July 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/utpens/status/1015851743022800896
It’s worth nothing that Fleury wouldn’t be playing in Sin City if the Penguins hadn’t made him available in the 2017 expansion draft.
The Penguins could’ve chosen another player to put up for grabs, but Fleury made the most sense to give up because new-goalie-in-town Matt Murry had made him expendable during Pittsburgh’s back-to-back Stanley Cup runs in 2016 and 2017.
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Just like he did in Pittsburgh, Fleury quickly ingratiated himself with Vegas fans by posting the best statistical regular-season numbers of his career and leading the team to a Stanley Cup appearance in its first year of existence. That’s how you immediately become a legend in two cities.
And now all Penguins fans can do is remember the good times, mainly the fact he was the Penguins’ starting goalie for 14 years, which included four Cup appearance and three wins.
All of those accomplishments completely obscure the fact that Fleury was frustratingly inconsistent during most of his stint in Pittsburgh. There was a reason Murray was able to quickly supplant him as the Penguins’ starting goalie.
But all Penguins fans choose to remember is that amazing stick save on an Alexander Ovechkin slapshot that Fleury made in game 7 of Pittsburgh’s 2017 playoff series with the Washington Capitals. Which, to be fair, is still objectively awesome:
If Fleury doesn’t retire a Penguin, it would be a tough blow for yinzers. But then again, no one should blame him for showing more loyalty to the franchise that didn’t practically drive him to the airport the second a younger talent showed up in Pittsburgh.