Stanley's Cup

Template:Infobox South Park episode "Stanley's Cup" is episode 1014 (#153) of Comedy Central's South Park. It originally aired on November 15, 2006. This is the 10th season finale of South Park. The episode name is a play on the name of the Stanley Cup, the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL).

Plot

Template:Spoiler Stan Marsh has hit rock bottom. He's got no job, no bicycle and his only way out of a bad situation is to coach the local pee wee hockey team. Once a hotshot pee wee hockey player himself, Stan has tried to put those days behind him, but he's still living with the memory of how he let his team down when he missed the winning shot in the big game. Now, he's about to find out that being a coach means facing your past. He's determined to show his kids what it's like to be a winner![1]

Plot synopsis

Stan's bike is towed for parking tickets, which is a problem, since he needs the bike for his newspaper route (which is how he earns money). He finds an opportunity to get his bike back, by coaching the Park County Pee-Wee hockey team. He quickly runs into a whole host of problems — one of the kids has cancer and the team from the next county are all jerks. His father becomes shocked that Stan would take such a job, and thinks that he's trying to "make up" for what happened when Stan was four, when he missed a shot that resulted in a tie for the big game. (Stan can't even remember the event.)

Nelson, the boy with cancer, takes a turn for the worse, and asks Stan to win a game for him. However, his team isn't very good — though neither is the Adams County team — and the team ties, 0-0. This makes Nelson's cancer "not better, but not worse, sort of putting him into a cancer limbo." The team is then invited to play against Denver County at the Pepsi Center, which is a very good team, with the same basic promise — the idea being that if Stan wins, Nelson will have enough hope to survive. Thinking about all the various movies, the team decides to believe in themselves and get a good player — and recruit Ike, based solely on the fact that he's Canadian. Stan's father confronts Stan about playing at the Pepsi Center — the same place where Stan lost his game years ago, while he still can't remember it — and while he initially says he won't be there to watch Stan "destroy himself," he then decides (without any actual prompting from Stan) to go anyway.

When they get to Denver to play in the intermission of a professional game, the other team doesn't show up, and Stan worries that since they can't play, it could result in Nelson's death — but the professional team lets the peewee team play against the Detroit Red Wings because they went through a lot of "emotional stuff," which of course doesn't go very well. The episode ends with the Detroit Red Wings viciously beating Stan's team 32-2, physically beating every member of the team, a bruised member of Stan's team telling Stan that he hates him, the Red Wings hoisting up the trophy all to the song We are the Champions, and Nelson whispering "no hope...no..hope..." as his heart stops beating.

Trivia

This episode is a parody of the Disney movie The Mighty Ducks.
The Detroit coach hugging his father is not a reference to Coach Bombay hugging his father in the original The Mighty Ducks. Bombay's father died. Gordon Bombay hugs his close friend, Jan, who runs the hockey store.
The general plot mirrors that of The Mighty Ducks, with someone in debt taking up coaching, and coming face-to-face with their past as a failed player.
Scuzzlebutt (from the episode "Volcano") is visible on a newspaper in the background of the South Park Gazette office, as is Mr. Garrison and his invention, "IT," featured in "The Entity".
This episode bears many similarities to sports movie cliches. Among those cliches, the most obvious were the addition of a ringer when the team needed a new, better player, and the traditional "winning music" that played when the team won (albeit the wrong team). It could be suggested that the episode highlights the 'other side' of sports movies, in that it shows that the losing teams in such films may be playing reasons similar to those the winning teams play for.
Songs featured in this episode include "Song 2" by Blur and "We Are the Champions" by Queen. We Are The Champions featured heavily in all of the Mighty Ducks Movies
Neither Cartman nor Kenny is featured in this episode; however, a blond-haired kid resembling Kenny can be seen in the flashback scene.
When the boys on Stan's pee-wee hockey team decide to get a good hockey player to play in the big game, the lines are reminiscent of The Losing Edge.
The man popping out in random scenes and voicing fake movie trailers about Stan's troubles is reminiscent of the movie trailers parodying Rob Schneider in The Biggest Douche in the Universe.
This is the first episode to feature Stan's name in the title.
The boy with cancer is a possible reference to BASEketball (Which Trey Parker & Matt Stone star in) in which Trey's character is pressured to make 3 home runs in a row for the boy in the hospital, much like how Stan is pressured to win the game for the dying boy in the hospital.
There are two more instances where the recently-deceased Steve Irwin is joked about in this episode. Dr. Doctor states "That little boy is gonna die faster than Steve Irwin in a tank full of stingrays.", while one of the players on Stan's team replies to Stan saying "They won't kill us" by claiming "That's what Steve Irwin said about the stingrays." These jokes could possibly be a response to controversy over South Park's Steve Irwin joke in Hell on Earth 2006.
In Stan's room there is a picture that says "The Street Warrior" which is a parody of the Mel Gibson Movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, however the text was not there in any previous episodes.
This is the first time Kenny has gone a whole season without dying since Season 6 (unless the "death" in "Make Love, Not Warcraft" is counted).
This is the third season not to have a Christmas episode.
When the crowd chants "let them play", this is a reference to a scene in Dodgeball or more likely Bad News Bears.
There are numerous errors in the numbers of the Red Wings players, most notably a player wearing #9, which was retired years ago for Gordie Howe.
The reason why the Red Wings were mentioned to be going through "emotional stuff" most likely parodies the fact that they lost to the Cinderella-story Edmonton Oilers in the first round of the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings have had a long lasting feud, culminating in the Brawl in Hockeytown.