Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

On The Road Back For Kevin Stevens

07/06/2017 at 6:40am EDT

from Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,

The reaction was jarring, a two-time Stanley Cup champion returning to the city where he was beloved and being greeted with consternation and even contempt. But maybe that’s why the Penguins decided to bring Kevin Stevens back to Pittsburgh and back to their organization in the first place. They knew he had a horrific story about addiction to tell, one that would offend many but maybe, just maybe, help a lot of kids....

The hockey players whom Stevens addressed at the camp are too young to remember that he was the NHL’s best power forward in the early 1990s. Man, he was something special, scoring 40 goals on the Cup-winning team in 1991 and 54 more when they repeated in 1992. He long will be fondly remembered here for guaranteeing a series victory against Boston in the 1991 playoffs after the Penguins lost the first two games....

Google video of Stevens’ collision with the Islanders’ Rich Pilon but be warned it is for mature audiences only. Stevens was knocked unconscious and landed face-first on the Civic Arena ice, leaving players on both teams and a crowd of 16,164 stunned and sickened. When doctors peeled the skin down from Stevens’ forehead, they looked at all the broken bones and compared the damage to someone stepping on a potato chip. They put in metal plates during a 4½-hour surgery, rolled the skin back up and needed more than 100 stitches to secure it.

Stevens scored 41 goals the next season, but many close to him will tell you he was never the same player or same person again. He always liked to drink and showed signs of being an alcoholic early in his career. But that was just the start of his problems. Addiction knows no boundaries. In January 2000 Stevens, who by then had moved on from the Penguins to Boston to the Los Angeles Kings to the New York Rangers, was arrested in a St. Louis suburban hotel for smoking crack cocaine with a prostitute. But the worst still was to come. Stevens was convicted in May on federal drug charges of conspiring to sell the painkiller oxycodone between April 2015 and March 2016.

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

From breaking news to in-depth stories around the league, KK Hockey is updated with fresh stories all day long and will bring you the latest news as quickly as possible.

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