Not counting the 2004-05 season that never was, the NHL has logged 25 consecutive seasons of U.S. network television partnerships. Sure, it has been a revolving door between ABC, NBC, Fox and back to the first two. But the league and sport’s advocates would surely agree that beats the emptiness of the ’80s.
With thorough, consistent national coverage of the regular season and playoffs, the NHL has cast the hallowed Stanley Cup in a slew of genre-transcending ads for all Americans to see. The majority of the playoff commercials are sentimental, inspiring or adrenaline-pumping. But neither the league nor its national TV partners and advertisers have forgotten that there should be a fun side to this as well.
Like any shooter on the ice, those aiming for humor will only hit the net a certain percentage of the time. Moreover, as the years pass, not every hit will be captured and made to live forever.
With that said, at least five funny gems of Stanley Cup commercials from the ’90s, ’00s and current decade have made their way to the unofficial annals of YouTube. Another one is nowhere to be found online, but memorable enough to earn a mention. If you need proof, you only need to ask anyone who is old enough to remember watching the 2000 playoffs.
We count these memorably amusing Cup commercials down here accordingly.
6. Stanley’s cup
In the early ’00s, otherwise known as the twilight of the NHL-ESPN marriage, the citizens of Hockey Falls underscored the league’s corporate partnership with Bud Light.
Granted, they had nothing on the preceding bubble-boys campaign or the animal that endorsed another Bud offshoot. (More on that later.) But they had their moments as prototypical puckheads who perhaps spent too much time in head-numbingly cold rinks.
Case in point: They once thought they had “a life-size replica of the Stanley Cup” on the way. What they get instead is a tad predictable, and pushes the PG/PG-13 envelope about as far as a mainstream network could. But it was a decent choice of plot for the combination of these characters and the sport’s springtime star.
5. Meeting the Lord himself
Never mind the fact that this is slow-pitch fodder for anti-Capitals fans.
Geico has produced a laundry list of ads where one party expects to hear one piece of advice or good news, only to get the “15 percent” tip instead. As long as Nick Backstrom was starring in the auto insurer’s hockey-based commercials, he might as well have had a turn in that motif.
And who better to complete the act than the ghost of Lord Stanley, withholding advice on how to win the Cup in the process?
4. Motown mix-up
After the Detroit Red Wings won back-to-back titles in the late ’90s, they starred in this FedEx ad. An unnamed official is near the end of his wits, as the trophy has inexplicably taken days to arrive at the arena.
When the Cup finally comes, the situation’s urgency patently gets the better of the man’s attention to detail. Instead of taking the intended box, he grabs a shipment of burro feed meant for a Bolivian village. Meanwhile the puzzled South Americans embrace a find a purpose for the mystery silver chalice.
Soon after this commercial premiered, the actual Cup switched locations to Dallas. As a testament to the ad’s impact, a Sportscenter anchor subsequently compared the supposed strangeness of the Stanley Cup in Texas to its erroneous delivery to Bolivia.
3. Jello Nieuwendyk
For its first postseason as the NHL’s sole U.S. network abode, ABC asked “Who will win it this year? What will they do with it?”
The practice of letting each member of a winning team spend a day with the Cup was five years old by then. And with the Stars defending in 2000, ABC touted upcoming telecasts by depicting supposed events from various Dallas players’ turns the previous summer.
Reigning playoff MVP Joe Nieuwendyk stood out in the commercials as much as he did on the ice. His spot showed him shaping a green jello mold, complete with the Stars emblem, with the trophy’s iconic mug.
2. Pritchard calls Peggy
Unlike a typical bodyguard, Phil Pritchard can and does enjoy a rare celebrity status. He has through all of his 29 years as the “keeper of the Cup.”
But of all the TV ads he has co-starred in, none match the humor of his dead-end outreach to Peggy. In this 2011 spot, the reliably unreliable customer-service representative of the egregiously outsourced USA Prime Credit gives the predictable runaround.
Unlike most of Peggy’s complaintants, however, Pritchard has a pressing task at hand. As he explains from the airport check-in desk, “I’ve gotta be in Chicago tonight for the Stanley Cup Final.”
Peggy’s indifference to Pritchard’s plight is all the more ironic when you consider his interaction with Patrick Kane. If he is so eager to get a shooting tip from the Blackhawks star, how can he not appreciate the need for the adored trophy’s presence at a potential clinching game?
1. Pilfered by the penguin
Eat your heart out, Ken Kilander. The famously disgruntled Montreal Canadiens fan could not even get out of Chicago Stadium in his attempted 1962 Cup theft.
Conversely, in this ad, the dreaded Bud Ice penguin somehow escapes several surefire detections. He gets the trophy out of its proper place, through airport security and on board the plane.
Anyone who watched an NHL telecast between 1995 and 1997 knew something like this had to happen. The short-lived variation on Budweiser completed a marketing match made in hockey heaven. Accordingly, the culmination of the campaign had to costar Hockey’s Holy Grail.
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