It's Crazy That No Other Sport Has Tried To Replicate How Much Passing The Stanley Cup Around Rocks
The Boston Celtics won the NBA Finals last night. Good. Great. Grand. Wonderful. Good for them. After the game was over, the team was presented the championship trophy, an MVP was named, Jayson Tatum tried his damndest to get his viral moment with that "we did it" he's been practicing all week, and then the team took off to Miami to celebrate.
Every time a team wins a championship in a major sport outside of the NHL, I'm astonished of uneventful the trophy ceremony is. Trophy, confetti, some excited yelling, and it's done. The NHL has put the blueprint together for everyone that they can just have for free, and not a one have taken it yet.
There's a reason why the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy to win in team sports. It takes a total buy-in from everybody in the organization to get the job done. The season is 82 games long. Each of those games is an hour each. So the general public really only sees these guys work 82 hours per year. That's 2 weeks worth of work. The general public doesn't know how much goes into being the team that gets a chance to hoist that trophy over their heads at the end of the season. Not just from the players and coaches, but from the front office and the equipment managers and the video guys and the trainers. Long nights, time away from family, missed birthday dinners here, missed peewee tournaments there.
That's what makes the Stanley Cup handoff tradition so great. It's a chance to make sure that everyone that played in a role in winning that Cup gets their chance to be rewarded for the time and effort they put into it. It's not just Joe Sakic passing the Cup to Ray Bourque. But it's towards the end of the night when guys like Keith Veronesi, the Director of Scouting Operations for the Vegas Golden Knights, gets a chance to lift that baby over his head.
It takes everybody, so everybody gets a touch.
And fortunately we'll get a chance to see it happen again tonight when Florida closes out the Oilers at home. They were gracious enough to let the Oilers shit pump them at home in game 4 to avoid the sweep. But now it's back to regularly scheduled programming of total annihilation from the Cats.