Pittsburgh--For the second year in a row, the Jostens team is paying an early fall visit to the Steel City to present the Pittsburgh Penguins with championship rings.
The Pens defeated the Nashville Predators in the Stanley Cup Final back in June to become the first team in nearly 20 years to be repeat NHL champions.
On Tuesday, the Jostens team was doing events throughout the Steel City after unveiling the diamond-studded rings in a private ceremony held the day prior at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Included among Jostens’s stops was Pittsburgh retailer Louis Anthony Jewelers, where employees tried on the ring and shared the results on Instagram.
Jostens, a Minneapolis-based company known in the jewelry world for making class and championship rings, created last year’s Stanley Cup bauble, as well as the 2017 Super Bowl rings for the New England Patriots and the 2016 Super Bowl rings for the Denver Broncos.
Here are 5 things know to about the company’s latest championship creation.
1. There’s a number 5 in the penguin’s eye. The top of the ring features the words “Stanley Cup Champions” with the team’s logo in the center.
In the logo, which features a skating penguin atop a golden triangle, the number 5 makes the bird’s eye, a nod to the total number of Stanley Cup championships won by the team.
2. The ring has a total of seven little diamond-set Stanley Cups. There are five on one side, denoting the total number of championships for the team and the year for each: 1991, 1992, 2009, 20016 and 2017. On the opposite side, there are two more with the words “Back 2 Back” between them.
Pittsburgh is the first team to win back-to-back Stanley Cups in 19 years. (The last team to do so was the Detroit Red Wings in 1998.)
3. The ring is two-tone. The Penguins’ 2017 Stanley Cup ring is awash in white, thanks to 14-karat white gold and the nearly 400 hand-set diamonds totaling more than 9 carats.
But Jostens also incorporated yellow gold for the team, which, like all sports teams in the Steel City, wears black and gold. In what the company said is a first for a championship ring, it created a technique that enabled it to insert independent, solid 14-karat yellow gold panels on either side of the ring.
4. “Play the Right Way” is engraved on the interior arbor of each ring. It is one of the many
mantras, or “Sullivan-isms,” employed by the team’s coach, Mike Sullivan, who led them to last year’s Stanley Cup victory too.
The rings also have the logos of the four teams the Penguins defeated in the playoffs--the Columbus Blue Jackets, Washington Capitals, Ottawa Senators and Nashville Predators--and the final standings from each of those series.
5. Some players’ rings have a few extra diamonds. Here’s an interesting fact that came via the Pittsburgh Penguins official Twitter feed.
The players with three Cup wins (those who were on the Penguins team when they won last, in 2009) got three extra diamonds on the back side of their rings. They are: team captain Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Chris Kunitz, who now plays for the Tampa Bay Lightning, and goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who got drafted by the expansion Vegas Golden Knights.
Penguins owner and NHL Hall of Famer Mario Lemeiux has five extra diamonds, marking the two Cups he won as a player and the three he’s won as owner.
Michelle Graffis the editor-in-chief at National Jeweler, directing the publication’s coverage both online and in print.
