Pittsburgh's 10 Greatest Teams
Honorable Mention to the 1990-92 Pittsburgh Pirates. They won 3 straight NL Eastern Division titles, but these were the only times between 1979 and 2013 that they got within 4 games of 1st place.
Honorable Mention to the 2013-15 Pittsburgh Pirates. They made 3 straight National League Wild Cards, but couldn't win a Division Series.
Honorable Mention to the 1992-97 Pittsburgh Steelers. 6 seasons, 5 AFC Central Division titles, 3 trips to the AFC Championship Game -- but won only 1 of them, and then committed the unpardonable sin of losing the Super Bowl to the Dallas Cowboys.
Say what you want about Terry Bradshaw, but, in Super Bowl XXX, Neil O'Donnell put on the dumbest performance any Steeler quarterback ever has.
Honorable Mention to the 2014-17 Pittsburgh Steelers. They've made the Playoffs the last 4 seasons, and reached the AFC Championship Game for the 2016 season. They may not be done.
Honorable Mention to the 1967-68 Pittsburgh Pipers. It was the 1st season of the American Basketball Association, and they won the Championship. They played only 4 more seasons, and didn't finish above .500 in any of them.
No, you can't count the Pittsburgh Pisces, because they were fictional, in the movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. Although, like the real-life Pirates and Steelers, they did win a league championship in 1979! But they didn't wear Black & Gold.
Honorable Mention to the 1969-71 Pittsburgh Penguins. They reached the round then known as the NHL Semifinals in 1969-70, only their 3rd season of play, and the Quarterfinals the next year, but would not get so close to the Stanley Cup again until the 1990s.
Very Honorable Mention to Pittsburgh's Negro League Champions: The 1931, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945 and 1948 Homestead Grays; and the 1935 and 1936 Pittsburgh Crawfords.
Now, the Top 10:
10. 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. World Champions. But between 1938 and 1965, this was the only time they got within 7 games of a Pennant. They finished 3 games back in 1966, as the players of the 1971 title team began to come in. The only 2 players on both the 1960 and the 1971 teams? The 2 Hall-of-Famers, Roberto Clemente and Bill Mazeroski.
9. 2007-09 Pittsburgh Penguins. Back-to-back trips to the Stanley Cup Finals, losing in 2008 and winning in 2009.
8. 1976-79 Pittsburgh Pirates. In 4 seasons, they won 92, 96, 88 and 98 games, but only in 1979 could they get past the Philadelphia Phillies, and "The Family" went all the way. The Pirates haven't won a Pennant since.
7. 1924-27 Pittsburgh Pirates. 4 seasons, 2 near-misses, 2 Pennants, and won the 1925 World Series. And 3 times in the 1930s, they would come within 5 games, but no Pennant.
6. 1901-09 Pittsburgh Pirates. 9 seasons, 4 Pennants, and won the 1909 World Series. They lost in 1903, and, of course, they didn't get a chance to take on the American League Champions in 1901 and 1902.
5. 1970-75 Pittsburgh Pirates. 6 seasons, 5 NL East titles, but only 1 Pennant, the 1971 World Series win. By the time they won again in 1979, it was almost an entirely different team, with only 2 holdovers, and 1 of those, Manny Sanguillen, had left and returned. The other was Bruce Kison.
4. 2015-17 Pittsburgh Penguins. Back-to-back Stanley Cups, matching the feat of 1991-92. They lost in the Conference Semifinals in 2018, but don't expect this run to be over just yet.
3. 1990-98 Pittsburgh Penguins. 8 seasons, 5 Division titles, 3 trips to the Conference Finals, and won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1991-92.
2. 2004-11 Pittsburgh Steelers. 8 seasons, 3 12-4 seasons and a franchise-best 15-1, 6 Playoff berths, 4 AFC North Division titles, 4 trips to the AFC Championship Game, 3 AFC Championships, and winners of Super Bowls XL and XLIII.
1. 1972-79 Pittsburgh Steelers. Somebody crunched the numbers, and saw that, in 8 seasons, the Steel Curtain played 41 games against teams that finished with a record of .500 or worse, and won 40 of them. That's getting the job done: 40-1 against teams you should beat. If this is true, then their overall record of 88-27-1 means that, in games against teams that finished the season over .500, they went 48-26-1, which is damn good. In other words, they didn't beat themselves. And it was hard for anyone else to beat them, too.
Here's the results: 8 seasons, 8 trips to the Playoffs, 7 AFC Central Division titles, 4 AFC Championships, and 4-0 in Super Bowls: IX, X, XIII and XIV -- 2 sets of back-to-back titles. The 1970s Steelers are a serious candidate for the title of the greatest team in NFL history.
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