My Day with the Cup: NHL Players Tell Their Stories About Hometown Celebrations with Hockey’s Greatest Trophy

Just four teams remain in the hunt for the Stanley Cup this postseason. Sadly, your Vancouver Canucks are not one of them, having lost Game Seven of their second-round series against the Edmonton Oilers. But winning the trophy is only the beginning, according to broadcaster and author Jim Lang. In My Day with the Cup: NHL Players Tell Their Stories About Hometown Celebrations with Hockey’s Greatest Trophy, he argues it is the offseason that provides the most satisfying moment for each member of the winning team.

“This is why they play and why they sacrifice,” he said. “They’ve won a Stanley Cup and because it’s such a special trophy, their name is on it, their family name, and they’re sharing it with the people they love and there’s no other trophy that does that.”

The Stanley Cup has been around since 1893 and has been the NHL’s top trophy since 1926. Yet, the tradition of each member of the winning team spending a day with the cup is a relatively recent one, dating back only to 1995.

“Well, I have to give a bit of credit to [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman [for that],” Lang said.

“I know, a lot of people listening will be like, ‘Gary Bettman?!’ But the year before, the [New York] Rangers finally won the cup after their long drought. Sorry, Vancouver Canucks fans. And so, they went a little crazy in Manhattan with the cup, it was a little unsupervised at times, so Gary Bettman, the NHL, and the Hockey Hall of Fame decided, ‘Let’s do something proper, [get] the curator from the Hall of Fame, Phil Pritchard, and his staff, a keeper of the cup. Bring the cup to whomever and let them have their day with a cup. But then we’ll watch it, make sure it’s safe, put it in a road case, and take it to the next player.'”

And so, a tradition was born.

Lang points out how there are three Stanley Cups — the presentation cup you see on the ice when it is awarded, the permanent cup on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame, and the bowl of the original Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup.

John Ackermann sits down with Jim Lang author of My Day with the Cup

Here are some more facts to nerd out on:

• The NHL started engraving names on the cup in 1924. Currently, the names of 13 teams can fit on each band of the cup. That works out to about 65 years’ worth of team names. Once a band is filled, it is removed and stored at the Hockey Hall of Fame. The next time a band of names is removed from the cup will be in 2030 – including the 1966-67 Toronto Maple Leafs. Ouch.
• ” Mike Bolt is one of the keepers of the cup and has been travelling with the trophy since 2000, logging well over 150,000 kilometres each year.
• ” It takes 14 cans of beer to fill the cup.
• ” People have eaten jello, spaghetti and meatballs, poutine, lobster bisque, sushi, ice cream, and all manner of cereals out of the cup.

Lang interviewed 30 players and coaches for My Day with the Cup. He had to write the book in short bursts in 2021, 2022, and 2023 – simply because his interview subjects were not available during the winter months.

“So, it was a May to September window for all of them — even for the retired hockey players. If they’re not coaching, they’re doing alumni work or they have their own businesses. So, you’re basically getting them on offseason or vacation time, training time, grabbing them whenever you can to build the foundation for the book.”

A lot of planning goes into how each member of the winning team spends their day with the cup. Some players admit they put more thought into the occasion than they did for their wedding day.

“Some of the wives will look at their husbands and say, ‘How can you say that?’ And they said, ‘Honey, I’ve not been dreaming of being married since I was five years old, but I’ve been dreaming of the Stanley Cup since I was five or six years old,'” Lang said.

If there is something they all have in common, it’s the desire to share the moment with everyone who helped them reach that pinnacle of pro-hockey success.

“The ultimate way to say ‘I love you and thank you is here’s the Stanley Cup. I want you to share it because I couldn’t have done it without you. You eat out of it. You drink out of it. Take photos with it because it’s your day as much it’s my day.'”

My Day with the Cup: NHL Players Tell Their Stories About Hometown Celebrations with Hockey’s Greatest Trophy is published by Simon & Schuster Canada.