Pittsburgh Pirates (NHL) NHL history with many firsts and other notable achievements. The Pirates were the first team in Pittsburgh to use the black & gold color scheme, basing their colors around the Flag of Pittsburgh's colors. Decades after the team folded, the colors have become the team colors of all three of Pittsburgh's major sports teams. However, during the team's existence, they would be the only team in the city with the colors, as the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, like all other baseball teams at the time, had a more patriotic red, white, and blue color scheme and wouldn't adopt black &
History of the Pittsburgh Pirates World Series each time. In both 1991 and 1992, they lost closely contested League Championship Series to the Atlanta Braves. After the 1992 season, the front office set out to rebuild the team, giving up several high-payroll players in favor of a younger crew. The Pirates were unable to produce a winning season until 2013, accumulating a 20-year losing streak – the longest in any of the four major professional North American sports leagues. The closest the Pirates had come to fielding a winning team during that period was the 1997 team, which finished second in the NL Central despite