Puck Collection- Some Highlights!

 

One of my favourite hockey-related thnigs to do is collect pucks. I like to collect pucks from places I’ve been, places my friends have been and ones that help me look back on and celebrate some pretty exciting moments, like the Blues Stanley Cup win. And yes, I’m still going on about that.

With not much hockey going on, I thought I’d do a wee blog post about some of the different pucks in my growing collection.

Ok so first of all here is my St Louis Blues Stanley Cup Champions puck. I love the design of this puck and if you look closely enough at the image you might be able to see all of the tiny NHL crests behind the design. The NHL playoffs are just such an exciting time of year and this year, although it was late and there were hub cities, it was pretty nice to have a good few early games in the first couple of rounds- lots of hockey and at a decent time for UK hockey fans! Well, this puck reminds me of one of the happiest moments of being a hockey fan. I cried a lot after that win! St Louis won their first ever Stanley Cup even after being last in the league on January 2^nd- a pretty amazing achievement! #PlayGloria!

Next (and it’s the last St Louis one!) is my boxed Blues puck that I got when I was visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The HHOF is one of my favourite places I have visited and is a must for any hockey fan if they are planning to visit the area. I would love to go back here someday. I love hockey history and learning about the past and present greats in our game. I was fortunate to be able to visit during the 100^th anniversary and see the original Stanley Cup in the vault!

Now for my Friendship Four pucks. For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Friendship Four, it is a NCAA tournament played in Belfast annually where four teams compete for the Belpot trophy and there are two games per day. It is one of the most anticipated weekends of the year for me and is always great craic with family and friends. The two days are packed with fast, physical hockey and fans get the chance to watch future NHL and EIHL players. The blank puck is also from 2019- it had come out of play during warmups!

This is the other puck that I have which came off the ice during warmups. It was actually the first one that I got from the ice. It was one of the rare occasions I was sitting at ice level and this one landed close beside me. Pucks are frozen before they are used so are quite cold when they come off the ice for some time.

This is another one of the pucks which I picked up when I was in Toronto. Toronto is one of my favourite cities that I have visited and I love the city skyline design of this puck. The city really does look so beautiful and some of the images posted online throughout the year of Toronto are absolutely stunning!

I also picked up this Toronto Marlies puck when I was in Toronto. It is surprising hard to find Marlies memorabilia in Toronto (or at least I thought it was!). At the time the Marlies were coached by Sheldon Keefe, brother of Adam Keefe who is the Head Coach of the Belfast Giants. Being a Belfast Giants fan, I was of course very interested to find something to add to my hockey collection which had a Belfast Giants connection. Not only this, but written on the back is the name Kyle Baun, a player who went on to play one season in Belfast and during this time added a Challenge Cup and EIHL league title to his achievements.

You might be wondering why I have a 2019 Boston Bruins playoff puck when they were the ones against St Louis in the Cup Final. Well, I think this puck is pretty cool. A friend picked it up for me while she was visiting Boston and on the back is a picture of TD Garden, the very place where St Louis beat Boston in game 7 to take the championship.

This next puck is from the Belfast Giants’ CHL adventure in 2019. After winning the league in 2019 (yayy), we secured a place in the Champions Hockey League. We had a place in the competition in 2014 but confusion whether the CHL were or were not giving an EIHL club a place meant that we lost out on arena dates and so were unable to take part and Nottingham had to take our place. So, it was nice to finally get to play in this tournament. We had games against Lulea, Ausberger and Liberec and although finishing bottom of the group, we won our first game vs Liberec in Belfast and the second was a close result and ended in dramatic fashion with Ausberger coming out on top.

The last puck that I’m going to highlight is the Division 1B World Championships puck. In 2017, the tournament was staged in Belfast and GB won the group and promotion to Div 1A, which they also won, and in 2019 competed in the top tier against teams such as Canada. During this 2017 tournament I was able to attend the 14-0 win against the Netherlands and the 4-0 win vs Japan which sealed gold for GB.

So that’s just a quick look at some of the pucks that I have in my puck collection and hopefully hockey will be back again soon and I will be able to add more to the collection.