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Following the Carolina Hurricanes’ Game 6 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights, Conn Smythe winner Jordan Staal took hold of the Stanley Cup.
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Effortlessly, the Canes captain raised the almost 35-pound trophy in the air. Staal then breezed around the ice as he shouted in celebration, keeping the Cup above his head until the moment he passed it to goalkeeper Frederik Andersen.
The remaining Canes similarly had no trouble hoisting the hockey’s holy grail.
“I‘ve always heard people say it’s heavier than you think, but it didn’t feel too bad,” Andersen said, according to NHL.com. “It wasn’t too bad.”
Perhaps it was a straightforward task for the Canes to handle the Cup because they had been training for the moment all year. Strength and conditioning coach Bill Burniston revealed in a May mini-documentary that the team kept a cinder block — which typically weighs around 35 pounds, like the Cup — in its workout room.
Players raised the brick above their heads once, in a lift they called the “blue collar press.”
“We asked the guys to do one press and think of the blue-collar moments that got them here,” Burniston said in the video. “And somebody that’s helped you get here.”
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Burniston has worked full-time for 10 seasons with the Canes, but has been with the team part-time since 2013.
When Rod Brind’Amour later had his turn to lift the Cup, he also easily handled it, even tossing it into the air before bear-hugging and lifting it toward the roof. As the Canes’ coach since 2018, he has transformed the team into a Cup-winning group with a puck-hounding, aggressive style of play, embodied by their training regimen.
“We are not in Cabo,” Burniston said in the video. “We are not taking a break. We are not on vacation right now. We are working. I do not know if there is a time I can remember the Carolina Hurricanes not coming hard out of the gate.”
Brind’Amour has now had his share of iconic moments with the Cup, having been the first to lift it after the Canes’ 2006 Cup win when he captained the team during his playing days.
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And his players had been slyly prepared to hoist it in 2026.