The winners originally kept it until a new champion was crowned, but winning teams currently get the Stanley Cup during the summer and a limited number of days during the season.

Every year since 1924, a select portion of the winning players, coaches, management, and club staff names are engraved on its bands, which is unusual among trophies.

After Lord Stanley of Preston (later the 16th Earl of Derby) was appointed by Queen Victoria as Governor General of Canada on June 11, 1888, he and his family became highly enthusiastic about ice hockey.

[11] Stanley sent the following message to the victory celebration held on March 18, 1892, at Ottawa's Russell House Hotel for the three-time champion Ottawa Hockey Club:[8][13][14] I have for some time been thinking that it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup which should be held from year to year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion [of Canada].

[13] Soon afterwards, Stanley purchased what is frequently described as a decorative punch bowl, but which silver expert John Culme identified as a rose bowl,[15] made in Sheffield, England, and sold by London silversmith G. R. Collis and Company (now Boodle and Dunthorne Jewellers), for ten guineas, equal to ten and a half pounds sterling, US$48.67, which is equal to $1,650 in 2023 dollars.

He made five preliminary regulations:[8][14]Stanley appointed Sheriff John Sweetland and Philip D. Ross (who went on to serve an unsurpassed 56 years) as trustees of the Cup.

[20] Naturally, the Ottawas were upset by the decision because there had been no challenge games scheduled and because the trustees failed to convey the rules on how the Cup was to be awarded prior to the start of the season.

The Cup trustees agreed to open the challenges to professional teams, because the ECAHA was the top hockey league in Canada at the time.

[27] In that same year, the first all-professional team, the Toronto Trolley Leaguers from the newly created Ontario Professional Hockey League (OPHL), competed for the Cup.

[32] In 1914, the Victoria Aristocrats from the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) challenged the NHA and Cup champion Toronto Blueshirts.

PCHA president Frank Patrick had not filed a challenge, because he had expected Emmett Quinn of the NHA to make all of the arrangements in his role as hockey commissioner, whereas the trustees thought they were being deliberately ignored.

[37] Ice hockey in Europe was still in its infancy at this time, so it was without much controversy that winners of the Stanley Cup continued styling themselves as the world champions just like in baseball.

[41] The series was tied at 2–2–1, but the final game was never played because Montreal Manager George Kennedy and players Joe Hall, Billy Coutu, Jack McDonald, and Newsy Lalonde were hospitalized with influenza.

However, in the meantime, the NHL (which had entered the U.S. only two years before) bought up the contracts of most of the WHL's players and largely used them to stock the rosters of three new U.S. teams.

Finally in 1947, the NHL reached an agreement with trustee J. Cooper Smeaton to grant control of the Cup to the NHL, allowing the league to reject challenges from other leagues that may have wished to play for the Cup:[46][47][48] This agreement was amended on November 22, 1961, substituting the Governors of the International Hockey Hall of Fame in Kingston, Ontario with the Committee of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, Ontario as the group to name the two Canadian trustees, if need be.

Eventually, following the establishment of the Canada Cup as the first best-on-best international hockey tournament, NHL president Clarence Campbell (who was a vocal opponent of the tournament) made public overtures to establish a true world professional championship in ice hockey, "just like the World Series".

In the end, Campbell's proposal went nowhere – eventually, the NHL resolved the WHA challenge by agreeing to merge with its rival, by which time the older league had quietly withdrawn its support for the idea.

[50] Adrienne Clarkson, then Governor General of Canada, alternately proposed that the Cup be presented to the top women's hockey team in lieu of the NHL season.

However, this was not always the case: one of Lord Stanley's original conditions was that each team could, at their own expense, add a ring to the Cup to commemorate their victory.

[61] The 1915 Ottawa Senators, the 1916 Portland Rosebuds and the 1918 Vancouver Millionaires all engraved their names on the trophy even though they did not officially win it under the new PCHA-NHA system.

The "Stovepipe Cup", as it was nicknamed because of its resemblance to the exhaust pipe of a stove, became unwieldy, so it was redesigned in 1948 as a two-piece cigar-shaped trophy with a removable bowl and collar.

Henri Richard of the Canadiens, with his name engraved eleven times, played on more Stanley Cup champions than any other player.

One of the oldest, started by the 1896 Winnipeg Victorias, dictates that the winning team drink champagne from the top bowl after their victory.

[78] The Cup is also traditionally presented on the ice by the NHL commissioner to the captain of the winning team after the series-winning game; each member of the victorious club carries the trophy around the rink.

In 1987 after the Edmonton Oilers defeated the Philadelphia Flyers, Wayne Gretzky handed the Cup to Steve Smith, a year after Smith made a costly gaffe that cost the Oilers the chance of making their fourth consecutive Stanley Cup Finals appearance.

Three players (the New York Islanders' Clark Gillies, the Anaheim Ducks' Sean O'Donnell, and the Pittsburgh Penguins' Nick Bonino) even allowed their dogs to eat out of the Cup.

NHL president Clarence Campbell felt that the original bowl was becoming too thin and fragile, and thus requested a duplicate trophy as a replacement.

[96] In 2018, the Cup was used to improve the spirits of those who were affected by either of two significant events which claimed the lives of multiple individuals: the Humboldt Broncos' bus crash on April 6, and the Capital Gazette shooting on June 28.

For the former, the Stanley Cup was brought to the hospital where the crash survivors were recuperating on April 15,[97] and for the latter, it was presented to Capital Gazette employees at their temporary office on July 3.

[100] The regulations set down by Lord Stanley call for two trustees, who had the sole, joint right to govern the Cup and the conditions of its awarding until 1947 when they ceded control to the NHL.