Just Another Sports Trophy…Or Is It? (S)

The other night, Tuesday June 13^th, to be exact, I turned on the TV to watch the last period of the Stanley Cup finals between the Florida Panthers and the Las Vegas Golden Nights. The score at the beginning of the 3^rd period was 6-1 in favor of the Golden Nights, and since they only needed one more win to clinch the trophy, the outcome was almost certainly a forgone conclusion…but I watched anyway. Oh yes, they did win by a score of 9-3. Later that night, I had a dream. I dreamt about an unfortunate, young Montreal hockey player who, at the age of 16 in 1966 (a year before the NHL expanded to 12 teams from 6), was knocked into a coma after a rather vicious hit into the boards. Miraculously, he suddenly woke up from that coma 53 years later on June 13^th, 2023, and when a nurse came running into the room, he looked at her and the first words out of his mouth were: “Who won the Stanley Cup?” The poor nurse was worried that what she was about to tell him would send him right back into a coma, but she quietly whispered, “The Las Vegas Golden Nights.” The look on his face said it all.

I was the same age as this unfortunate hockey player in 1966, but my reaction to Las Vegas winning the cup comes with having been awake through the various expansions of the NHL, and even though the league was made up of six teams before 1967, four of those were located in the US, albeit in states knowing that ice wasn’t just something that went into cocktails. Don’t get me wrong; I applaud the players, coaches, management, etc. for not only winning this coveted trophy, but for doing it in only their sixth year as an NHL team. This, by the way, is a new record, which was previously held by the expansion Philadelphia Flyers (seven years). And let’s not forget the fact that the Nights also made the Stanley Cup finals in their first year, which is a pretty miraculous feat. However, I was born in Montreal, started playing hockey when I was around six, organized ice hockey at ten, and I ate, slept, and breathed the Montreal Canadiens. So, when teams from States without a capital “W” winter win the cup, a little piece of me dies!

Too over-the-top? Maybe, but here are my reasons, for whatever they may be worth. The Stanley Cup is the oldest sports trophy around. It was donated in 1892 by Sir Fredrick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston, and son of the Earl of Derby, to be presented to the championship hockey club of the Dominion of Canada. The first team ever awarded the trophy was the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association in 1893. From 1910 – 1926, the National Hockey Association took possession of the cup as a symbol of professional hockey supremacy. Since 1926, only NHL teams have competed for the trophy. The Montreal Canadiens have won the cup a record 24 times since their existence; they also won it a record five consecutive years from 1956-1960, six more from 1965-1973, and then four more consecutive wins from 1976-1979. What does all this mean? Well, it means that from the year I started playing hockey at age six to when I turned 29, Montreal won the Stanley Cup 15 times in 23 years. So, when a city located in the desert, which cannot reproduce the image seen above, and image that was an integral part of my youth, it gives me pause.

There are currently 32 teams that make up the NHL, seven of which are located in Canadian cities. Las Vegas is not the only team situated in a city without “winter.” There are some, especially Canadians, who feel that Canada has lost ground when it comes to hockey being Canada’s game, but there are always two ways of looking at things. When the league had only six teams, with four located in the US, around 98% of the players were Canadian born. Now, that figure is somewhere between 50-65% which, if you just look at the percentages, tells a story of declining prominence. But percentages can be misleading. Take the Stanley Cup winning Las Vegas Golden Nights for example. Their 36 player roster consists of 23 Canadian-born players, seven American born, and the rest hail from Russia, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. That boils down to 60% of Vegas’s team being Canadian, but this is another percentage that needs further context. Canada, with a population of around 38 million people, is providing 60% of the players. The rest of the players, seven American and 13 in total, come from countries whose combined population total is 503.9 million people. Now the percentage reads: 60% (23 players) from 38 million people; 40% (13 players) from 503 million people. Let that sink in.

And now for the irony. I have lived in three major North American cities: Montreal, as mentioned above, Vancouver, which entered the NHL in 1970 and has yet to win a Stanley Cup (that’s 53 years of “maybe next year,” making Vegas’s achievement even more striking); and finally, Los Angeles, the city I now call home. In all my years in Montreal, the closest I have ever been to Lord Stanley’s trophy was in a display case at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. However, eight years after moving south of the border, I now possess a picture of me with my arm around the cup, courtesy of the LA Kings and the President of AEG, who just happened to be a parent at my wife’s school and used the opportunity of the Kings 2014 Stanley Cup victory to put on a fundraiser for the school using the cup as bait. So, call me a hypocrite for my rant about Vegas being a desert team. The LA Kings are a close second on that front, but it was the Stanley Cup!

Los Angeles 2023