In the sixth and deciding game of one of the most thrilling Stanley Cup Finals in recent memory, Carolina captain and Conn Smythe Trophy winner Jordan Staal was the first to hoist Lord Stanley’s fabled mug as his Hurricanes won their second title in franchise history.

Staal finished the postseason run with eight goals and four assists for 12 points i in 19 games. But he saved his best for when the games mattered most. In the Stanley Cup Final, the centerman scored goals in each of the first five games of the Final and six times in all.

For Staal, the 17-year span marked the longest a player has gone between two Cups. The 37-year-old also won the Stanley Cup back when he was a 20 year old with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Carolina (and Staal) winning the Stanley Cup marks the fifth straight season that an ex-Penguin has won.

Joining Staal on the Cup-winning squad is forward Mark Jankowski. An integral part of Carolina’s incredibly effective bottom six, Jankowski scored a goal and added four assists for five points in 19 games.

He, too, is a former Penguin. The former first-round pick from Calgary in 2012 didn’t make it into the NHL full-time until the 2017-18 season. After three years with the Flames, they let him walk following a very unproductive 2019-20 campaign.

Jankowski signed with the Penguins for the Covid season in 2021, where he played a checking role on a one-year, “show me” deal. He scored the first goal of the season for the Penguins that year, en route to four goals and seven assists (11 points) on the season.

Future stops included Buffalo and Nashville, the latter of which traded Jankowski to the Hurricanes at the deadline last season.

Carolina’s win officially put an end to the back-to-back reign of the Florida Panthers. When Florida partied in 2024 and 2025, another duo of ex-Penguins were among them: Evan Rodrigues and Dmitry Kulikov.

Rodrigues, who the Penguins acquired from Buffalo at the trade deadline in 2020, spent the few short remaining weeks of that season and the next two in Pittsburgh.

An effective Swiss Army knife type player, the forward slotted into numerous places in the lineup and had a career year in 2021-22. In 82 games, he scored a career-high 19 goals and 43 points, adding an additional three goals in seven playoff games.

Despite that success, he didn’t land a new deal until September, where he was picked up on a one-year contract in Colorado. After a year with the Avalanche, he signed a four-year deal in Florida, which rewarded him with over $3 million a year. Rodrigues has in turn chipped in for two Cup wins for the Panthers.

Kulikov, meanwhile, has a much more brief story in Pittsburgh. The left-shot defenseman was acquired at the trade deadline in 2023, and appeared in just six games for the Penguins before he was injured and missed the rest of the year.

Though technically not the final acquisition by former general manager Ron Hextall, Kulikov was the last NHL-impacting trade he made. As a free agent, Kulikov reunited with his draft team just in time for the back-to-back Cup runs.

But before Florida was the latest back-to-back champ, the Panthers were dealt heartbreak in the Final at the hands of the Vegas Golden Knights. Making (at the time) their second Final appearance in six years, Vegas made up for their inaugural season defeat with a convincing five-game win over Florida.

That Golden Knights team rostered winger Phil Kessel, of Penguins fame and back-to-back champion from his days in Pittsburgh. After a 2019 trade that saw Kessel spend three years in Arizona, the folk hero signed a one-year deal in Vegas for what was his final season in 2022-23.

Kessel’s record-setting Ironman streak stayed intact, hitting 1,064 after a full 82-game slate with the Golden Knights. But the skilled winger had lost some of his offensive touch, totaling 14 goals and 22 assists for 36 points. By the postseason, Kessel spent most of his time watching from the press box; he only appeared in four games during that run. Still, he went out on top, with a third ring to his name.

In 2022, former Penguin Jack Johnson was on the winning team, when the Avalanche brought their third Stanley Cup to Denver. In 2018, the Penguins signed the veteran defenseman to a surprising five-year deal worth $3.25 million a year.

The former Columbus Blue Jacket struggled to live up to that cap hit, and in a world where $3.25 million meant a lot more than it used to, his contract quickly became a problem for Pittsburgh. Two years in, the Penguins bought out the remaining three years of his deal, making him a free agent ahead of the 2021 season.

After a year in New York with the Rangers, Johnson signed on to play a depth role in Colorado, where he won his first Stanley Cup.

Johnson’s buyout charge is actually still on the books today; a $916,667 price tag counted against Pittsburgh’s salary cap this season. But his buyout is slated to officially expire on July 1st, officially closing on the book on his time as a Penguin.

The streak of ex-Penguin champions snaps once we get to Tampa Bay in 2021. The Lightning, winning their second of back-to-backs that summer, featured no former Penguins on their roster. Although, that team did have eventual Penguin defenseman Jan Rutta and (technically on the roster at one point, although he never played) Luke Schenn.