Challenges To  Championship—The Stanley Cup—Page 2

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In 1918, the National Hockey League champions took over the old NHA’s guaranteed spot in the finals.  In 1921, the PCHA and the Western Canada Hockey League brokered a deal to see who would play for the cup. In 1923, the WCHL champion Edmonton Eskimos got the right to play the NHL champ Ottawa Senators for the Stanley Cup—and lost. Soon, the PCHA merged with the WCHL, but in 1926 all Western pro teams folded, leaving the NHL the sole possessor of the Stanley Cup, a title the League has held since 1927. Stanley’s challenge cup had been transformed into the championship of a sole professional league (again, totally flying in the face of the spirit of Stanley’s 1892 letter), but the Cup did not lose any of its glamour. Today, it is regarded as the most important championship in all of hockey.

Name Game

A key reason the Stanley Cup is so magical is that it allows for winning players to be immortalized by having their names inscribed on it. When the Cup is full, a band is pried off the barrel of the Cup, flattened and then mounted in the Hockey Hall of Fame, creating space for new champion clubs.

But the name game was not Lord Stanley’s intention, either. According to his edicts, only the name of the winning team and the year it won would be placed on the Cup. In 1903, the Cup did not yet have a barrel; it was simply the bowl itself, and it had been filled with the names of the champion teams from the last 10 years. So, the AAA players carved the team’s name into the bowl with a nail. This nail-engraving practice continued until 1907, when the Kenora Thistles shocked the Montreal Wanderers to take the Cup. The Montreal players were so enraged at losing, they all decided to engrave their names on the Cup when they won it back from Kenora later that season.

Finally, in 1924, Stanley Cup trustees agreed that from then on, each player on the winning team would have his name engraved on the Cup.

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