Lemieux's comeback is more complicated than him deciding to simply come out of retirement. It was at least partially a business decision.
The Penguins filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the 1998-99 season. They owed Mario Lemieux more than $30M USD (he had agreed to defer some of his salary to give the franchise some breathing room, financially). Other players were collectively owed tens of millions of dollars, but nobody else was close to Lemieux. He probably realized there was no realistic prospect of getting repaid, so he agreed to convert the debt into equity. That had to get approved by the courts, and the NHL. If Lemieux didn't do that, there's a good chance the Penguins would have gone bankrupt (or, at the very least, to a different city).
Right at the start of the 1999-2000 season, Lemieux had just forgiven most or all of that $30M USD (I don't know if he got anything in cash), in exchange for a majority stake in a near-bankrupt franchise. The Pens had a pretty good season (Jagr won the Art Ross, and upset the much stronger Capitals in the first round) but their situation was still precarious. They were still averaging less than 15,000 attendees per home game (they were over 16,000 just a few years before).
Lemieux came out of the retirement in December 2000. This was a challenge with the NHLPA, since was simultaneously a player and an owner, which presented an obvious conflict of interest. (It's conceivable - and I don't have evidence for this, just a theory - that Lemieux's delayed start was due to needing to get the necessary approvals from the NHLPA. Either way, he was the majority owner of a large business, in a difficult financial situation - which would have created stress and demands on his time that literally no other player in the NHL was dealing with). Attendance jumped 5% over the year before (and that's the average for the entire year - presumably we'd see a bigger increase looking just at the games since Lemieux made his comeback). They sold out 26 games that year (more than any season since 1993).
I'm not sure how all this should be taken into account. Maybe we can say Lemieux was being a greedy owner, trying to maximize his franchise's value, playing and skipping games as he pleased. Maybe he was a heroic player, coming out of retirement to save the nearly-bankrupt team, and risking tens of millions of dollars in the process. Either way, there's no precedent for this anywhere in NHL history, and the situation is more complicated than Lemieux randomly deciding to come out of retirement one day.
Who saved the franchise multiple times, winning Cups along the way?
