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Kevin Stevens: The Pride of Pembroke Powers Forward

By Jamie MacDonald, 09/26/24, 10:15AM EDT

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From Hobomock Arena to the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Kevin Stevens reflects on a storied career

Kevin Stevens will be inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame's Class of 2024


Stevens celebrates a goal against the Washington Capitals. Credit: Getty Images

You know how many people can claim beating Wayne Gretzky in the National Hockey League scoring race between 1980-81 and 1991-92?

The answer is … two.

One is Pittsburgh Penguins legend Mario Lemieux.

The other is Pembroke native Kevin Stevens.

In 1991-92, Stevens, who in three prior seasons had scored 86 goals in 196 total games with the Penguins, scored 54 goals and added 69 assists while amassing more than 250 penalty minutes in what serves up one of the great statistical definitions of power forward.

Another statistical definition: 6-foot-3, 230 pounds. 

In an era of big, tough hockey, Stevens fit right in with his size. But that sort of deft scoring touch at his size has always been exceedingly rare. (Gretzky, who finished behind Lemieux and Stevens in that 1991-92 race, was listed at 185 pounds. Stevens was at least two inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than everyone else in the top 10 in '91-92.) 

Another feather in the cap for Stevens at Pittsburgh: At the end of that year, the Penguins repeated as Stanley Cup champions. During that playoff season, Stevens scored 13 goals. The year before, he’d scored 17. In Sports Illustrated’s recap of the repeat story, with Lemieux on the cover, the first quote in the story went to Stevens after Pittsburgh swept Jeremy Roenick’s Blackhawks. 

Pittsburgh’s goaltender was Massachusetts native Tom Barrasso, inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009, while Roenick was inducted in 2010.

And, now, Stevens will join them. Earlier this month, USA Hockey announced its Class of 2024: Matt Cullen, Brianna Decker, Frederic McLaughlin, the 2002 Paralympic Sled Hockey Team and Stevens.


Pembroke Youth Hockey product Kevin Stevens used to play at the chain-linked fence Hobomock Arena.

Humble Beginnings in Pembroke

Stevens, though, from where he began, didn’t figure to be a Hall of Famer waiting to happen.

He played Pembroke Youth Hockey back in Hobomock Arena’s chain-link fence days (instead of glass above the dasher, the boards were topped by jersey-grabbing fence), and the days of being on track as a prodigy hadn’t really dawned in Pembroke. 

“I just came up a different way,” he says. “Everybody now, they come up as ‘hockey players’ wanting to play in the NHL. I wanted to play in the NHL, but I knew the reality and how hard it was to play in the NHL. I played at Pembroke youth hockey, at Hobomock. And I played baseball. I played football.”

Boston College, though, would set up as an early set in a career full of lucky progressions – and a terribly unfortunate detour – on the way to the Hall of Fame.

“I remember when I was getting recruited it was BC, BU and Harvard, but I needed a scholarship or I wasn’t going to be able to go and pay for it,” says Stevens. “My sister went to BC, so that was where I wanted to go.”

So, away he went, to Chestnut Hill, which turned out to feel not so much as far away from home. 

“Back then, it was all Massachusetts kids,” Stevens says. “They were all my friends. When I went to live there, it was like living there with the same guys I was playing with at my house in Pembroke. It was all the best players in Massachusetts, all my buddies, when I went to BC and it was awesome.”

East Bridgewater, Medford, Stoneham, Worcester, Cohasset, Boxboro, Southborough, Quincy, Brockton, Wakefied, Tyngsboro, Jamaica Plain, Weymouth, Acton, West Roxbury, Newton, Somerville, Hingham, Milton. All represented on the roster during Stevens’ freshman season at The Heights.

Drafted the same year as Barrasso, just a little over 100 picks later, No. 106 overall in the sixth round by the Los Angeles Kings at the 1983 NHL Entry Draft, Stevens was traded all of a few weeks later to the Pens for Anders Hakansson. Stevens, meanwhile, picked up momentum at BC.

“I loved Boston College,” says Stevens, who scored more than 70 goals for the Eagles, including 35 in 39 games his senior year. “Such a great place. So many good players. Bobby Sweeney, Brian Leetch, Craig Janney, Dougie Brown, Kenny Hodge Jr., Greg Brown. We had so many great guys. Such great teams. Such a good place to go. I loved it there.”

Playing with so many elite players would only be the start of that good fortune for Stevens into the early 1990s. 

“I was at Boston College and I got traded to Pittsburgh, and it was just luck,” Stevens says of a deal that worked out well for both parties. “I just saw [then-Pittsburgh General Manager] Eddie Johnston today and he told me that when he traded for me it was one of the best trades he made. They saw me playing once at BC, and he just took a shot with me because I was big and he thought I could score.”

A Boost with the Red, White and Blue

By the time Stevens left BC, Lemieux, drafted No. 1 overall in 1984 after scoring 133 goals in 70 games for Laval in 1983-84, had been scoring in bunches in the NHL. Through his first three seasons, "Super Mario" had amassed nearly 350 points, but the Penguins hadn’t made The Leap to the postseason with Lemieux.

For Stevens’ part, he wasn’t quite ready to make The Leap, either, straight out of BC in 1987. But another bit of fortune would help him build the most significant blocks of what would get him to the NHL and put him, eventually, on a line with one of the greatest players in NHL history: Team USA.

Stevens credits much of his success to the time he spent with the U.S. Olympic Team in the run-up to the Calgary Winter Games in 1988. 

“I could always score, but going to the Olympic team after my senior year was huge for me,” says Stevens of a team that included more than 20 players who would go on to play at least a game in the NHL. “That’s kind of where I learned how to skate. I was getting better at skating at BC, but, when I went to the Olympic team and learned how to train and skate, that’s when my game kind of took off.”

For much of the 1987-88 season, Team USA played against college and pro and exhibition teams, and they practiced. And practiced. And practiced.

“We started playing in July and August, and we played together for like five or six months,” Stevens says. “It was phenomenal. That was the best five or six months of my life. Great guys. On and off the ice. Some of my best friends. I could not have had more fun being part of the team. We had so much fun on that team.”

To wit: When the Games ended, teammate Tony Granato was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “ … the hardest thing about this is knowing that tomorrow we won’t be going to breakfast, to practice, and doing everything together again.”

Stevens still raves about the experience both as a team and for his own development.

“Being on the ice for 3-, 3 1/2 hours every single day,” he says. “We had a skating coach named Jack Blatherwick and we just did a lot of power skating, and a lot of training, learning how to train your body. Paul Vincent also helped me with my skating. He put me in harnesses and all kinds of things. It was crazy. But I learned from those two guys and I just put the time in and changed my thinking. I think more mental than anything. I just became stronger skater.”

Welcome to The Show

It wasn’t long after the Games that pro hockey beckoned.

“It was a whirlwind at first,” says Stevens of joining Pittsburgh for the last few weeks of the 1987-88 season. “When I came into the league, I was lucky to be with Penguins. I was so fortunate to get traded at the time that I did. Craig Patrick was building a phenomenal team, Mario hadn’t won yet, and [Patrick] was trying to fill the team out with some good players. And so I was lucky enough to be one of those players.”

After his 16 games in ‘87-88, Stevens started the following year in the minors, scoring 65 points in 45 games for Muskegon in the IHL before being promoted to Pittsburgh about midway through the 1988-89 season. 

“When I came to Pittsburgh, Mario was here, but I didn’t play with him right away,” Stevens says. “I played with Johnny Cullen and Mark Recchi. Johnny Cullen was as good as passer as anybody I ever played with. Reccs is a Hall of Famer and still a good friend of mine.”

It wasn’t long before the scoring touch translated to the NHL, which then led to playing with Lemieux, one of the highest compliments in the game.

“Playing with Mario was great, but you have to play well,” says Stevens. “He’s not playing with you if you can’t score. The thing with those guys who are that good, they don’t have to pass you the puck. They can pick and choose. They’re that good. He can pick and choose who he wants to pass it to. So, if he’s giving you a scoring opportunity and you aren’t scoring, he’s not going to give it to you anymore. Those guys want points. They want to score. You’re not just playing with them and you say, ‘This is great.’ You have to carry the responsibility. They’re not in it to have a good time. They’re in it to get points and win scoring championships and Stanley Cups. That’s the biggest thing I learned with Gretzky and Mario. When you play with those guys and they get an opportunity, if they’re up five or six goals, they want to keep going. When it’s 6-1, they want to make it 9-1.”

Thankfully for Stevens, being able to score came naturally.

“I think I always had good hands,” he says. “I was a catcher in baseball. I was a quarterback in football. So I had good hand-eye coordination the whole time. It was just a matter of learning how to score and getting into position for opportunities, finding different areas on the ice. I scored a lot of my goals in really close. I wasn’t one of those guys who wandered high in the slot. I got a lot of my goals in that blue paint. I knew where I had to be. I didn’t try to fool anybody. My game was down low, in front of the net and banging around, hopefully finding loose pucks. And I had decent enough hands that I could score when I was down there.”

In his first full season, 1989-90, Stevens scored 29 goals in 76 games. He followed that with his first 40-goal season in 1990-91, the first of his two Cup runs. In defending the title, Stevens recorded that first 54-goal season, followed by a 55-goal season. 

His life at the time, as he says, was pretty much the one anyone could have wanted.

“I had won two Stanley Cups and had back-to-back 50-goal years,” says Stevens. “If you wanted someone’s life, you wanted mine. I had everything. I was at the top of the top when it happened.”

A Runaway Train

“It” is one of the most unfortunate turns in the history of hockey careers.

“When I got stuck in it, I was 28-years-old,” Stevens says. “I didn’t even know what drugs were. And it just changed the path of my life for the next 25 years. I didn’t know I had this gene. And then I got hurt two months later, and then you get on the pain pills, and from there it’s a challenge. It was weird because if you know anything about addiction, it’s so powerful. And if you don’t stop it, it’s a runaway train.”

And in these chapters of his life, now more than a decade removed from it, Stevens, who works for the Penguins as a scout, tries to pass along his message to kids, too.

“It can happen to anyone,” he says. “That’s what I try to tell kids. It can happen to the kid with the mother and father and a perfect household. When I started doing it, I didn’t know what addiction was. I didn’t know what an addict was. I didn’t know you could get addicted to pain medication. I didn’t even know what it was. I just know it made me feel better. You start off when you’re not addicted, and then it turns to addiction and then you’re stuck.”

His game suffered. His life suffered.

“It was a runaway train,” says Stevens. “It took me a long time to get off. And it was a struggle. It was brutal. Addiction takes and takes and takes until there’s nothing left. That’s what it does to most people and that’s what it did to me. I made a 20-second decision. I don’t know why I did it and I could have said no."

Rather than being a lifelong member of the Penguins, Stevens would go on to play, from 1995-96, for the Bruins, Kings, New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers and back to Pittsburgh for a pair of shortened seasons before his career ended in 2001-02 with 874 games played, 329 goals and 397 assists.

Life’s Good

Nearing 60 now and with four kids, Stevens’ life is a whole lot sweeter so distanced from the detour of his career. And that path, coincidentally enough, leads right back to Pittsburgh.

“Yeah, life’s good,” Stevens says. “I work for the Penguins and it’s just good to be involved in hockey. It’s nice to work for a team that you really want to see win. It’s not just a job to me. It’s really the only team I want to see win. You could work for any team, but I have this drive. I played there. I love the city. I love the people. I want to see the team win badly, so I do the best I can to help them.”

The game has been good to him and he has been in a spot for a long while to be good to the game. Of course, hockey is different than it was when power forwards were so much more prevalent in the game, but his appreciation for it hasn’t gone anywhere. 

“The game I was playing then was great, and the game is great now,” says Stevens. “I love the game now. It’s just the way it is. Stuff changes. It evolves. Now it’s a faster and smaller type of game and not the big, physical type of game. But hockey is still hockey. You have to put the puck in the net one more time than the other guy.”