After having his bike impounded, Stan has to pay for tickets, so he coaches a peewee hockey team. There, he learns one of the kids has cancer and wants him to win for him.
Stanley's Cup contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: One kid mentions that his father will beat him up (again) if he loses the game.
- Anachronism Stew: Deliberately invoked, as Randy and Sharon are shown with '70s hairstyles in the flashback of Stan as a peewee player.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Nothing good ever happens in this episode. At the beginning, Stan was horribly injured trying to pry his bike back from the jerkass tow driver, and at the end his Pee Wee team gets beat up mercilessly, being the last thing the terminally ill Nelson saw before he died from his cancer.
- Baldness Means Sickness: Nelson is bald and dying of cancer.
- Bait-and-Switch: After Stan is accused of coaching the peewee hockey team to make up for his shortcomings in peewee hockey when he was younger, a dream sequence of the events occurs, but it's Randy's dream.
- Curbstomp Battle: As a result of kindergartners facing off a professional hockey team in the Detroit Red Wings, the peewee hockey team lost...miserably...
- Death of a Child: Nelson, in the end, watches his team's failure, and then finally succumbs to his cancer.
- Death by Despair: Poor, POOR Nelson.
- Deconstructive Parody: Of sports movies like The Mighty Ducks, playing up almost every possible cliché there is to the genre but turning the team members into a bunch of inept kindergarteners. It ends extremely cruelly by ramping up the violence often associated with hockey and having the other team have the triumphant victory.
- Downer Ending: And a BRUTAL one at that. The peewee hockey team has the fuck beaten out of them and Nelson dies after seeing it all happen.
- Excuse Plot: Lampshaded in the beginning. Stan points out that if they give him his bike back he can pay off the debt, but he is then told he wouldn't learn anything then. Stan points out that there is nothing he needs to learn.
- Kafka Komedy: Most of the episode is one, long Humiliation Conga for Stan. He's berated by his boss for not filling his quota (completely ambivalent to the fact that he has to get up at 4 in the morning), his bike gets towed, an obnoxious Character Narrator refuses to give his bike back (claiming that he's doing it so that Stan would "learn something") and forces him to coach a peewee hockey team full of inept, Inspirationally Disadvantaged kindergarteners, one of whom has leukemia, while he and his parents repeatedly try to make it Stan's problem, and the kid with cancer dies as the opposing team is treated like heroes for their win. His parents are certainly no help, Randy thinking Stan is doing it due to not winning at hockey in his youth when Stan only thinks of it as a job.
- No Sympathy: Adam's County coach arrogantly brushes off the fact Nelson has cancer.
- At the end of the episode, Stan desperately tries to put a stop to the ridiculously unfair match. Everyone in the audience starts chanting "Let Them Play!" "Let Them Play!"
- Out of Focus: Kenny and Cartman are absent from the episode. Kyle appears and has a speaking role, but only for one scene; this is mainly a Stan episode.
- Pinball Protagonist: Much like Season 6's Asspen, Stan is very unwittingly forced to play the role of The Hero in a Cliché Storm sports movie. This time it has a much more realistic ending.
- Potty Failure: The reason Stan's missed shot was so easy is that the goalie ran away after defecating himself.
- Refuge in Audacity: The audience doesn't seem to mind the peewee hockey team getting destroyed on the ice.
- Serious Business: Randy once again takes little league sports way too seriously. So does everyone else in the final game for that matter.
- So Proud of You: Randy tries to invoke one of these moments when he agrees to go to the match at the Pepsi Center and cheer him on but Stan couldn't care less. At the end of the episode the coach of the other team has this moment with his dad.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Stan's team's first match is scored by a rock song, "Song 2" by Blur. Rather than any intense competition happening, the kids on the teams don't even try; multiple skate slowly and trip, one stands and picks his nose, another waves to his mom, and the game ends with neither team having come close to scoring any points.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Downplayed, the peewee hockey team says stuff kids their age they shouldn't be saying. Though as opposed to the usual cursing, the kids are rather pessimistic for kids their age.Player: They look tough; I think Nelson's gonna die for sure.
- Underdogs Never Lose: Completely turned inside out. The Pee Wee hockey team get absolutely destroyed by the Detroit Red Wings.
- Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: It's never said whether Stan got his bike back or not.
- Would Hurt a Child: And how! The peewee team ruthlessly gets the shit beaten out of them by the Detroit Red Wings, and is left bleeding out on the rink.
Nelson: No hope. No... hope...(absolutely fucking dies)
