Former Penguins defenseman Ben Lovejoy announces retirement
Ben Lovejoy, a defenseman who did two tours of duty with the Pittsburgh Penguins and helped the team to the 2016 Stanley Cup, announced his retirement from the NHL on Wednesday night.
Lovejoy, 35, played 11 NHL seasons, including parts of seven with the Penguins. He made the announcement while working as an analyst on NHL Network’s “NHL Tonight” show.
A smooth-skating right-handed shooter, Lovejoy signed with the Penguins as an undrafted free agent out of Dartmouth in 2007. After three seasons in the AHL with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, he worked his way into the NHL lineup by 2010-11.
Lovejoy was traded to Anaheim in 2013 and spent most of the next three seasons with the Ducks before the Penguins reacquired him in a controversial 2015 trade deadline deal for Simon Despres. The move paid dividends for the Penguins the next season when Lovejoy was a key component on the team’s championship blue line.
He appeared in all 24 playoff games, recording two goals and four assists.
After the season, Lovejoy signed a three-year deal with the New Jersey Devils. He ended his career with the Dallas Stars after a trade-deadline move last year.
All told, Lovejoy played 184 regular-season games for the Penguins, recording 38 points and a plus-22 rating.
In 2017, he became the first active NHL player to announce that he will donate his brain for the purposes of concussion research. He remains the only player to publicly make such a pledge.
Jonathan Bombulie is the TribLive assistant sports editor. A Greensburg native, he was a hockey reporter for two decades, covering the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins for 17 seasons before joining the Trib in 2015 and covering the Penguins for four seasons, including Stanley Cup championships in 2016-17. He can be reached at jbombulie@triblive.com.
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