New details leak regarding the Tom Dundon and Stanley Cup engraving saga and it just got worse
Photo credit: Troy Wayrynen-Imagn Images
Two lines on the Stanley Cup went unused this week. Bobby Gorman's name was not one of them.
The NHL permits each championship team a maximum of 55 engraved names. Carolina submitted 53.
Tom Dundon placed himself, his wife Veruschka, and their five children on the first two lines, ahead of Rod Brind'Amour, Eric Tulsky and every player who dressed.
Gorman, the head equipment manager who has been with the franchise since its Hartford Whalers era, was left off entirely.
Nearly every reaction has treated this as arithmetic. The family took seven slots, so somebody had to go.
The math never actually forced anyone off
It doesn't hold. With 53 of 55 names used, two spaces were sitting open when the engraver finished.
Gorman could have been added without removing a single Dundon. Joel Nystrom, three games shy of the 41-game threshold, could have filled the other.
That distinction matters more than the outrage does. A full list would mean Dundon made an ugly tradeoff, while an unfilled list means there was no tradeoff to make.
Two blank lines are not a constraint. They are a decision, and the man who signed off on his seven-year-old's name signed off on leaving them empty.
Approval was never the safeguard people think
The second assumption is that the league failed to intervene. Colin Campbell reportedly signed off on every name, which is the required NHL step.
Phil Pritchard told Jeff Marek the Hall of Fame first saw the engraving late the afternoon before it went public, and that seeing names only afterward is not unusual.
So the process worked as designed. The design hands the pen to the team, and Carolina wrote 53 names while leaving two lines blank.
Fans keep asking how the NHL let this happen. The better question is why Carolina stopped writing.
Decades of taped sticks and sharpened skates ended one line short of nothing. The room was there and nobody used it.
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