Less than 24 hours after the end of the Stanley Cup Final, the Cup is already out day-to-day with upper and lower-body injuries.
The 130-year-old trophy sustained some pretty heavy damage as the Florida Panthers celebrated their 2025 Cup Final victory over the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday night. Cracks on the rim are visible in multiple photos taken over the last 12 hours, while its base is dented.
The damage to the Cup’s bowl could clearly be seen on the ice, while the large dent in the base was revealed when the Panthers brought the trophy to Elbo Room, a bar in Fort Lauderdale.
This year’s Panthers are far from the first to inflict harm on the best trophy in pro sports, with the Cup taking a beating from many teams since it was first awarded in 1893.
The most notable recent damage came from then-Colorado Avalanche forward Nicolas Aube-Kubel, who dented the trophy’s base in 2022 while taking a fall during the team’s on-ice celebratory photo.
In 2018, when the Capitals won the franchise’s first championship, the team bent the rim of the Cup due to their constant desire to drink upside down out of the bowl, a feat that would famously be coined a “Cup stand.”
“It happens every year, the bowl gets damaged — basically it gets ‘out of round’ if you know what I mean,” Keeper of the Cup Phil Pritchard told RMNB in 2018. “It happens because it is a 125-year-old trophy and not designed for guys to hoist like [they do]. It is nobody’s fault; it just happens every year. It has become part of the lore of sports’ greatest trophy.”
Other famous instances of damage include when the 1905 Ottawa Silver Sevens “drop kicked” the Cup into Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, leaving it overnight and returning in the morning to reclaim it. The 1999 Dallas Stars also threw the Cup off a balcony, seeing it catch the lip of Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul’s pool before crashing into the water.
The NHL has required some teams that damaged the Cup to pay for the repairs, as seen with the 1962 Toronto Maple Leafs, who footed the bill after dropping the trophy into a bonfire, and the 1987 Edmonton Oilers, who repaired it themselves at a local auto body shop.
