One last skate in black and gold
Marc-Andre Fleury is coming back to Pittsburgh for one night, not for a comeback, but for closure. The Penguins announced the beloved goaltender will sign a professional tryout agreement that lets him practice with the team and play a brief stint in a preseason game — a ceremonial return to the city where his NHL story began.
President of Hockey Operations and General Manager Kyle Dubas framed it as a thank-you to a franchise icon. He called the moment a chance to honor not just a Hall of Fame career, but a presence that shaped the room and the fan base. Fleury, now 40 and retired, echoed that sentiment in a French-language interview, saying he wants to wear the Penguins jersey one final time, see familiar faces, and nod to the past.
The plan is simple and tight: Fleury will join practice at noon on Friday, September 26, then dress the next night and play a single period in Pittsburgh’s exhibition game against the Columbus Blue Jackets at PPG Paints Arena. He reinforced that he’s “staying retired.” This is a cameo, not a tryout for a roster spot.
On paper, it’s a PTO like any other — the type teams use in September to look at unsigned players without committing a contract. In practice, it’s something else entirely: a one-night handoff between a generation of Penguins fans who grew up with No. 29 and the players who followed him.
Fleury’s return taps into a deep well of memory in Pittsburgh. Drafted first overall in 2003, he arrived as the franchise was rebuilding and grew into the steady, acrobatic backstop behind the Sidney Crosby–Evgeni Malkin era. His glove-snag finish on Nicklas Lidstrom in the dying seconds of Game 7 in 2009 remains one of the franchise’s defining snapshots — the save that sealed a Stanley Cup on the road in Detroit.
He left Pittsburgh after the 2017 expansion draft, handing the starting job fully to Matt Murray, and then helped Vegas reach the Stanley Cup Final in its first season. In 2021, he captured the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top goaltender, proof that his game aged with him, getting sharper and more efficient long after most goalies fade.
The full career arc is staggering: 22 NHL seasons from 2003 to 2025 across four teams — Pittsburgh, Vegas, Chicago, and Minnesota. The totals underline his place in the sport’s elite. He appeared in 1,051 regular-season games, won 575 of them, and posted 76 shutouts. Only Martin Brodeur sits ahead of him in wins and games played. He stacked 15 seasons with 20 or more wins, nine with 30 or more, and two at the 40-win mark. That’s consistency at a level few reach and even fewer sustain.
His Pittsburgh chapter is the heart of it. Three Stanley Cups — 2009, 2016, and 2017 — all tied to the black and gold. He departs as the franchise’s all-time leader in goaltender wins and shutouts, the face of a position for more than a decade. Ask around the league and you hear the same two things about him: the competitive streak that flares when the puck drops and the easy, magnetic personality that smooths everything when it doesn’t.
Saturday’s preseason setting suits the moment. It’s the right stage to let him take a curtain call without distorting the team’s camp plans or the season ahead. Expect an ovation that stretches, players tapping sticks, and a bench that is half locked in on the game and half watching a friend soak up a last lap. The Penguins have leaned into these nods to history before — including recent celebrations for past stars — and they tend to do them with care.
It’s worth being clear about what this PTO is and isn’t. It doesn’t put Fleury on the opening night roster. It doesn’t come with a guaranteed contract or a cap hit. It’s a mechanism to let him step on NHL ice in Pittsburgh once more in an official sweater, in front of the people who watched him grow from a raw teenager into a champion.
There’s symbolism all over it. A player who bridged eras — from a rebuilding team playing in front of sparse crowds to a perennial contender under a bright spotlight — gets to draw a line back to where he started. Pittsburgh gets to say thank you on its own ice, not in a visiting sweater or on a video tribute between whistles.
- Practice: Friday, September 26 at 12:00 p.m. local time.
- Game: Saturday, September 27 at 7:00 p.m. vs. Columbus at PPG Paints Arena.
- Plan: Fleury dresses and plays one period, then exits. He remains retired.
- Contract: Professional tryout only — no regular-season commitment or cap implications.
Zoom out, and Fleury’s résumé holds up against any era. The volume stats pop, but the context matters too. He carried heavy minutes through rule changes that boosted scoring, weathered pressure in a market that expected to contend every spring, and adapted his style as the league sped up. Early Fleury won on reflexes and fearlessness; later Fleury quieted his game, refined his reads, and beat chances before they turned into wild scrambles.
The mix of peaks and persistence is rare. There’s the breakthrough Cup in 2009, the transition years where he split the net and reinvented himself, the 2017 handoff amid another title, and the expansion fairy tale in Vegas where he shepherded a brand-new room to the Final. That 2021 Vezina wasn’t a nostalgia award; it was validation that the late-career version of Fleury was as good as any.
For the Penguins, nights like this reinforce the through line from the franchise’s past to its present. Fans who watched the 2009 run can share the moment with kids who only know Fleury from highlights and the occasional road trip visit. The organization gets to celebrate a standard set over years — show up, play with joy, compete like it matters — and tie it to the crest on the front.
What happens after the final horn on Saturday? No jersey announcements, no statues, no immediate next steps. The team hasn’t put any of that on the table, and that’s fine. The point here is the skate itself: one more period, one more ovation, one more lap under the bright lights in the place that made him a star and, just as importantly, a fan favorite.
If you’re measuring legacies, the numbers already do a lot of the talking. Second in wins. More than a thousand games. Seventy-six shutouts. Three Cups. A Vezina. But Fleury also leaves behind an image that isn’t a statistic: a smile peeking out from beneath a mask, a wink after a sprawling save, and a goalie who made a hard job look like fun without ever losing his edge.
That’s the version Pittsburgh will get on Saturday — a champion taking a quiet bow, a franchise giving him the stage, and a city ready to turn a preseason period into a memory that will live next to the biggest ones.
How Fleury got here and why it matters
He arrived as a teenager with heavy expectations: first overall pick, fresh from junior, stepping into a rebuild. The learning curve was steep. There were shaky nights and painful playoff exits. What endured was the bounce-back — a knack for resetting after a bad goal and making the next save. Teammates talk about that almost as much as they talk about the highlight-reel stops.
The Penguins of the late 2000s formed their identity around a core that drove play and a goalie who could steal momentum. In 2009, that blend paid off. In 2016 and 2017, it carried through roster turnover and injuries. Even when he ceded the net during parts of those back-to-back runs, Fleury’s starts in the spring steadied the team when it needed it most.
The exit in 2017 was complicated and generous all at once. He waived protection for the expansion draft to make the Penguins’ roster puzzle work, then went to Vegas and became the face of a new franchise. That kind of move tells you as much about the person as the player.
Since then, he has crossed milestones that felt out of reach when he first pulled on a Penguins sweater: 500 wins, then 550, now 575; 1,000 games and beyond; a Vezina that arrived nearly two decades into his career. The numbers stack up, but his reputation does, too. Players linger to talk to him after games. Coaches trust him. Equipment managers swear by him. Those little details rarely make a box score, yet they explain why this night in Pittsburgh exists.
As for the mechanics of the PTO, it’s straightforward. A professional tryout lets a player practice and appear in the preseason without a standard player contract. Teams use them to evaluate depth. Here, the purpose is ceremonial. There’s no promise to play beyond the one period. There’s no path to opening night. It’s a formal way to say goodbye on home ice, with the league’s rules satisfied and the moment given room to breathe.
That’s what Saturday offers: space for a proper farewell. A goaltender who helped define modern Penguins hockey gets to step back into the crease he made his own and share a few more minutes with a city that never really stopped calling him one of theirs.
