A few more Stanley Cup pictures...

Yea, I can't quite let go of the end of hockey season. This is the slow time of the sports year for me - hockey's over and football training camps are the better part of two months away. I'm a Red Sox fan, but not a huge, die-hard fan like I am of the Oilers and Cowboys. So, I'm holding onto hockey for just a bit longer, even if my team was a pretty miserable failure this past season.

Last night, a few Ducks took Stanley to The Tonight Show to pay Jay Leno a visit...

From left, Jay says hello to the best trophy in sports along with Jiggy, Chris Pronger and Brad May. I love stuff like this - I know I've been typing it a great deal in the last week, but it's good for the game - it exposes the game and the fun surrounding it to potentially a great many people who may not know what the NHL is all about.

When is the last time the Lombardi Trophy, or those stupid looking trophies from MLB or the NBA went for a trip to any late-night talk show? No time in recent memory that I can think of.

This is a picture of the Ducks' dry erase board in their locker room on Wednesday before the Cup-clinching game. I love little insider tidbits like this. True fans love to hear about insider stuff like this. I don't see an NHL Network in the near future, but I sure wish the networks that broadcast NHL games would give us more stuff like this. In fairness, the league seems to be getting it - Pierre McGuire was interviewing coaches when games were coming out of commercial breaks on the bench - something that would never have happened 10-15 years ago.

I've been a gleeful, frequent critic of NHL Commish Gary Bettman over the years, but he's done a lot of things right. His greatest legacy, whenever he steps away from the league, is getting the owners and players to agree on a level financial playing field for the league's 30 teams. For that, he deserves credit.

The celebration is tomorrow at the Honda Center in Anaheim - I'll bring you more pictures on Monday. (Sunday is the bike race in Philadelphia - we'll be out and about for most of the day, and into the night.)

Let the record reflect that I'm being a true hockey fan here. It hurts to be talking about the Anaheim Ducks as Stanley Cup Champions, but that's the way the game goes sometimes. I just hope that next year or the following year I can be posting many great pictures of Oiler players parading the Cup around the ice and celebrating with all of the team's great fans.

More than that, I'd like to give a hat tip to my friends up north. A Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup since the 1992-1993 season, when the Montreal Canadians won it. This is becoming an epidemic in the country where hockey is king. I hope it happens for any Canadian team soon, except Calgary.

Canada became spoiled with the many dynasties in NHL history that it was a given that a Canadian NHL team would seriously compete for it every year - Montreal, Toronto and (later) Edmonton all had long stretches where those teams were favored to win it or seriously threaten to, year in and year out. I can't say that's no longer the case, because the last three Stanley Cup Finals have all featured Canadian teams, before which there was a nine-year drought where no Canadian team made it. So, maybe the tide is turning.

There's even talk of the NHL some day returning to Winnipeg. I think it would be a very good thing - it's never a bad thing to have more Canadians involved in the league. Only time will tell.