Teemu Selanne had been in the NHL for about a decade when he made his friends in Finland an offer. If he ever reached a Stanley Cup Final, he would fly all twenty of them across the Atlantic and pay for the lot.
In 2007 he reached one with Anaheim, and the twenty of them got on a plane.
“They know how to drink. It was basically every friend from my childhood years,” Selanne told Sportsnet. “When I’d played about ten years in the NHL, I promised them that if I made it to the Stanley Cup Final, I’d fly all 20 of my friends there and pay for the whole thing.”
Elliotte Friedman, conducting the interview, had heard that the group drank the aircraft’s entire alcohol supply dry. Selanne confirmed it.
“And that’s exactly what happened. It was an expensive promise, but it was worth it,” he said.
Then came the part he hadn’t thought through.
“I thought we got paid for playing in the playoffs too, but we weren’t,” Selanne said, laughing.
Teemu Selanne’s Stanley Cup season:
| Games | Goals | Points | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regular season | 82 | 48 | 94 |
| Playoffs | 21 | 5 | 15 |
| Stanley Cup Final | 5 | 0 | 3 |
Do NHL players get paid during the playoffs?
Their salaries are paid out across the regular season, which ends the moment the postseason begins. What players receive instead is a share of a league-wide playoff bonus pool, which is divided between the clubs that advance and is a fraction of what a star forward earns in a normal month.
So Selanne covered flights, hotels and a thoroughly emptied drinks cart for twenty men while earning nothing at all.
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He was 36 that spring, in his 15th NHL season, and had never previously been past the second round. Anaheim beat Ottawa 4-1 in the Final, and he scored 48 goals in the regular season to become the first player over 35 in league history with back-to-back 40-goal campaigns.
The last few minutes were the ones he wanted to remember. Leading 6-2 with time running down, Selanne told head coach Randy Carlyle he didn’t want to go back out, preferring to take it all in from the bench. Carlyle sent him anyway, and he ended up playing every other shift.
Selanne retired in 2014 with 684 goals and 1,457 points in 1,451 games.
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