Their Cup runneth away

The Newfoundland Growlers won the ECHL Kelly Cup the other night, and not because they have an awesome nickname. The Growlers won because they beat the Toledo Walleye fair and square in the finals, four games to two. So they had every right to hoist the Kelly Cup and parade around the ice with it, as winne--

Hey, wait a minute.

That's not the Kelly Cup!

That's an imposter Kelly Cup!

So just what is the ECHL trying to pull here, trotting out a Cup as phony as Monopoly money? What kind of cheesy practical joke is this, replacing the crown jewel of ECHL supremacy with this Happy Meal prize of a Cup?

Well ...

You'd have to ask the Colorado Eagles that. This is their doing, not the ECHL's.

The Eagles, see, won the Kelly Cup last year. Then they jumped up to the American Hockey League. They were supposed to return the Cup, as teams do every year, but in all the packing up and moving, they forgot to do so. Now they're essentially holding it hostage, even though they say that's not what they're doing.

“The management of the ECHL has full knowledge of the situation with the Kelly Cup. We have made numerous attempts to return it. They have chosen to ignore our requests, therefore the Kelly Cup remains in Colorado. This is all that will be released regarding this matter,” Eagles team owner Martin Lind said in a prepared statement.

As prepared statements go, this one has more cowflop crammed into four sentences than even the prepared statements coming out of the White House these days. "Made numerous attempts to return it"? What, they're still using the Pony Express out there in Colorado, and the riders just didn't get through?

And what does "They have chosen to ignore our requests" imply, if not that they're holding onto the Cup as leverage for some reason? The implication is clear that the Eagles think there's some sort of quid pro quo involved in returning the Kelly Cup, which after all would merely entail boxing it up and shipping it to the league office via that newfangled FedEx thing. So obviously there's some sort of dispute going on here -- some speculate it's a spat over league exit fees -- and the Eagles are, in fact, holding the Kelly Cup hostage.

In the meantime, the league can take comfort in the Eagles' assurances that the Cup is "safe" and in "pristine" condition at some undisclosed location in Colorado.

No, really. That's what the Eagles said.

And that doesn't sound like a hostage situation at all. Why, no sir.