Lyle Odelein’s last NHL stop was the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Pittsburgh is where he stayed.
The former Penguins defenseman died Friday of a heart attack, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. He was 58. Odelein lived in Fox Chapel with his wife, Laurel, after a 16-season career that ended in black and gold, and the team joined the rest of the league in mourning a player better known for the crease he cleared than the points he scored.
“Lyle was known for his tough exterior on the ice, but we will always remember his generous heart and enormous laugh,” the Penguins said Saturday. “Our condolences go out to his wife, Laurel, their children and the Odelein family.”
Odelein arrived in September 2005 on a one-year, $500,000 deal, a veteran body for a Penguins roster that was still waiting on Sidney Crosby’s first full season to take shape.
The Quill Lake, Saskatchewan, native played 27 games, with one assist and 50 penalty minutes, before a knee injury shut him down. He did not return. Those 27 games closed a career of 1,056 NHL contests, 50 goals, 202 assists and 2,316 penalty minutes, 30th in league history.
The résumé that preceded Pittsburgh was the one that made him.
A seventh-round pick of Montreal in 1986, Odelein was part of the Canadiens’ last Stanley Cup team, in 1993, a plus-35 regular season and 20 playoff games of the kind of physical defense Montreal still talks about.
He later played for New Jersey, Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas and Florida, and in 2000 became the first captain in Columbus Blue Jackets history.
What Pittsburgh knew of him after the sweater came off was different. Odelein and Laurel built a local business, owning dozens of Supercuts franchises in the region and beyond. He became a neighbor, not a visitor.
In 2018 the city also became the place that kept him alive.
After a blood infection attacked his aortic valve and his liver and kidneys began to fail, surgeons in Pittsburgh performed a rare triple transplant on April 4, replacing the valve and giving him a new liver and kidneys.
He survived a procedure that left him temporarily paralyzed, then recovered enough to take part in Montreal’s 25th-anniversary celebration of the 1993 Cup that fall.
Eight years later, the fight ended at home. Teams he played for marked the loss over the weekend.
In Pittsburgh, the memory is narrower and closer: a short, hard season at the end of a long career, a family that put down roots in Fox Chapel, and a player the organization remembered less for the hits than for the laugh.
