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Which Calgary Flames would have been engraved on the Stanley Cup in 2004?
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Photo credit: Sergei Belski-USA TODAY Sports
Ryan Pike
Jul 15, 2024, 10:00 EDTUpdated: Jul 14, 2024, 12:31 EDT
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The Calgary Flames very nearly won the Stanley Cup in 2004.
After losing in Game 6 and Game 7 to the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Flames unfortunately didn’t hoist the Cup 20 years ago. However, had they won either of those games, they would have had the task of engraving names of team members on hockey’s holy grail.
We decided to put together our best, educated guess at which individuals would have made the cut. The Tampa Bay Lightning received 52 names, and that’s what we’re working towards. We’re also using prior Cup winners for guidelines on which staff members would have been engraved, while looking at the official guidelines for player eligibility – a player had to play in half of the regular season games or one game in the Stanley Cup Final (or have dressed for at least 41 regular season games as backup goaltender).

Non-players

Based on prior Cup winners and that year’s team photo, we estimate 23 non-players would have definitely been engraved on the Cup.
  • Owners Murray Edwards, Harley Hotchkiss, Alvin Libin, Allan Markin, Bud McCaig, Clay Riddell, Byron Seaman and Daryl Seaman
  • President and chief executive officer Ken King
  • Vice-president of hockey administration/chief financial officer Mike Holditch
  • Special assistant to the general manager Al MacNeil
  • Director of hockey administration Mike Burke
  • Director of communications Peter Hanlon
  • Manager of team services Kelly Chesla
  • Head coach and general manager Darryl Sutter
  • Assistant coaches Rob Cookson, Jim Playfair and Rich Preston
  • Goaltending coach David Marcoux
  • Strength and conditioning coach Rich Hesketh
  • Development coach Jamie Hislop
  • Head athletic therapist Morris Boyer
  • Equipment manager Gus Thorson
(Four individuals would likely have been included on both the 1989 and 2004 Cup engravings: Hotchkiss, the two Seaman brothers, and MacNeil.)

Players

The following 26 players were automatically eligible for engraving, in roughly this order:
Jarome Iginla (captain), Chris Clark, Mike Commodore, Craig Conroy, Shean Donovan, Andrew Ference, Denis Gauthier, Martin Gelinas, Miikka Kiprusoff, Chuck Kobasew, Jordan Leopold, Matthew Lombardi, Dave Lowry, Toni Lydman, Dean McAmmond, Steve Montador, Ville Nieminen, Marcus Nilson, Krzysztof Oliwa, Robyn Regehr, Steve Reinprecht, Oleg Saprykin, Chris Simon, Roman Turek, Rhett Warrener and Stephane Yelle
(McAmmond and Reinprecht missed the playoffs due to injuries but met the regular season games requirement to qualify for a spot.)
If we’re working off of the 52 spaces that Tampa Bay received, we’ve allocated 49 spots, so there are three remaining.
For non-players, there are probably two spots to be spoken for between director of amateur scouting Mike Sands, director of scouting Tod Button, assistant equipment manager Les Jarvis and assistant athletic therapist Gerry Kurylowich. Some teams have opted to include everybody with “director” in their title (as it usually captures the most senior scouts), while others have opted to go for the bench staff. It’s hard to say which two would be included, and the 1989 Flames engraving isn’t much help because the team had so much less staff back then that it feels like an unfair precedent to cite.
For players, the only one that seems to have a strong case for inclusion is Brennan Evans, who played a pair of games against Detroit and is the only player that played a playoff game that didn’t automatically qualify for engraving. We would guess that the Flames would have petitioned to have him included if there was space to do so.

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