Florida Panthers' Stanley Cup damage just the latest mishap in the trophy's storied history
Some hockey fans are understandably bent out of shape over the Florida Panthers damaging the Stanley Cup this week, but the coveted trophy has been through worse.
It’s been sunk to the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s been used in the baptism of several infants and at least one baby has pooped in it.
It’s even been dropped — or maybe it was tossed — from a second-storey balcony overlooking a rock star’s whiskey-shaped pool.
“It happens every year, the bowl gets damaged — basically it gets ‘out of round’ if you know what I mean,” Cup keeper Phil Pritchard told a Washington Capitals blogger in 2018.
“It is nobody’s fault; it just happens every year. It has become part of the lore of sports’ greatest trophy.”
The Stanley Cup has once again sustained some damage from the recipients. ????
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) June 18, 2025
(????: Peter Joneleit/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) pic.twitter.com/lEaSm4Ijo4
Here are just a small handful of the known stories about what the silver and nickel trophy has endured through its 131 years.
Dents and cracks
At some point after knocking off the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 on Tuesday night, the Panthers managed to crack the trophy’s bowl and dent the base before even leaving the arena, as evidenced by photos being circulated on Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the Hockey Hall of Fame told the Associated Press it will be repaired in time for Sunday’s victory parade in Sunrise, Fla.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Cup has been damaged almost immediately after it was awarded.
As the Colorado Avalanche gathered on the ice for a team photo to celebrate their 2022 championship, Nicholas Aube-Kubel stumbled and dropped the Cup as he skated into the dogpile, leaving a noticeable dent on the base.
Nicholas Aube-Kubel takes a tumble with the #StanleyCup ????@Avalanche | #GoAvsGo pic.twitter.com/bvQJJIyH7K
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) June 27, 2022
Just a year before, the Tampa Bay Lightning damaged it at some point prior to or during a boat parade to celebrate a second-straight title.
That’ll buff out. https://t.co/lpTMYYMBzq pic.twitter.com/25A11bdY2t
— Bolts Jolts (@BoltsJolts) July 12, 2021
Because the Stanley Cup spends 24 hours with each player and staff member of the winning team, how the damage occurred is usually a mystery or the stuff of anecdotal legend. But while visiting St. John’s with the Boston Bruins’ Michael Ryder in the summer of 2011, cameras captured the trophy taking a tumble from a table.
Three years earlier, a few days after the Detroit Red Wings claimed the Cup, it was dented after falling off a table at the restaurant owned by defenceman Chris Chelios.
The Cup makes a splash
The Panthers were the last team to take the hockey’s holy grail swimming when they took it to Fort Lauderdale Beach after last year’s defeat of the Oilers in the final. At points during their revelry, players hoisting the Cup were diving into waves.
Pritchard, in an email to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel , expressed concern about possible erosion but said they “managed to clean it as good as possible and dry it off.”
Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk later admitted it wasn’t ideal.
“I think somebody said that’s not technically allowed, but I said it was too late,” Tkachuk said Thursday. “It already happened.”
Other famous dips include the time it ended up at the bottom of Mario Lemieux’s pool following their 1991 win, tossed there from a 20-foot high waterfall by defenceman Phil Bourque.
“We had to dive in,” Bryan Trottier recounted on the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast in 2022, “Troy Loney and I dive and get the Cup out of the Pool. It was very tarnished the next day.”
The most famous pool story occurred eight years later as the Dallas Stars celebrated the organization’s first championship.
While partying at the home of Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul, the Stars celebrity superfan said Guy Carboneau tossed the Cup to teammate Craig Ludwig from a balcony above his pool — that was s haped like a bottle of Crown Royal whisky — only for it to hit the pool deck and fall in the chlorinated water.
Carboneau disputed that version of events in a 2022 interview with D Magazine in Texas , saying it was an accident as he tried to hand it off to Ludwig.
“If I really wanted to throw the Cup, I would have thrown the Cup. But that was not my intention.”
Ludwig, who admitted in the same article that they were all fairly drunk by this point, couldn’t be sure what happened.
Oh, Baby!
The first known and reported instance of an infant being baptized in Lord Stanley’s Cup came in 1996 when the Avalanche’s Sylvain Lefebvre used it for his daughter’s
He was followed in 2008 by the Red Wings’ Tomas Holmstrom, whose niece was welcomed into the Christian faith in the bowl from which countless beers and bottles of champagne have been slurped.
The Pittsburgh Penguins’ Josh Archibald had his three-week-old baptized in 2017, and the Avalanche’s Jack Johnson used it for all three of his kids on his day with the trophy in 2022.
In 2008, Kris Draper admitted to the Toronto Star that his newborn daughter “pooped in the Cup.”
“That was something. We had a pretty good laugh,” said Draper, who cleaned it out and “still drank out of it that night.”