from Sean Fitz-Gerald of the National Post,
Despite a six-year-old court settlement affording them the discretion to award the Stanley Cup to a team outside the National Hockey League, the trophy’s two trustees are advising beer-league players across Canada not to hold their breath if the NHL lockout scuttles the playoffs again next spring.
During the last lockout, in which NHL owners cancelled the 2004-05 season, the Stanley Cup sat, unused and un-hoisted, for the first time since the flu epidemic of 1919 forced a cancellation. A group of recreational hockey players in Toronto challenged the idea that the NHL alone could award the trophy with a claim filed in Ontario Superior Court.
And they won.
A settlement was reached in 2006, and it gave the trophy’s trustees the opportunity — but not the obligation — to “award the Stanley Cup to a non-NHL team in any year in which the NHL fails to organize a competition to determine a Stanley Cup winner.”
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