standing superstition about whether a team should touch the conference championship trophy could be tested this year as the teams battling for the Stanley Cup took different approaches to the debate. The Philadelphia Flyers and Chicago Blackhawks took very different roads to the Stanley Cup finals and that continued as one team snubbed tradition while the other embraced it during trophy presentations for the conference championships. Chicago captain Jonathan Toews kept with tradition and did not touch the Clarence Campbell Bowl, which is awarded to the winner of the NHL's Western Conference champion. But Philadelphia's Mike Richards tossed convention aside when he picked up the Prince of Wales Trophy Monday as his team became Eastern Conference champion. “There was actually a little bit of a debate on the ice,” Richards told reporters. “My first instinct was to grab it.” Philadelphia scraped into the playoffs in the last regular season game and overcame a 3-0 series deficit against Boston to keep its Cup hopes alive. The Blackhawks breezed through the regular season with the league's third-best record and cruised through the playoffs, including a sweep of the San Jose Sharks in the prior round. Teams often take different approaches to the conference championship trophies and get differing results. Last year the Pittsburgh Penguins touched the Prince of Wales Trophy and went on to win the Stanley Cup. But that was a year after it avoided touching the trophy and went on to lose in the final. Game One of the Stanley Cup final is Saturday in Chicago. Yzerman Lightning GM Hall of Famer Steve Yzerman was named general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning following his turn as executive director of Canada's gold-medal winning Olympic ice hockey squad, the NHL team said Tuesday. The 45-year-old Yzerman, the former center for the Detroit Red Wings, had held the title of Vice President/Hockey with the Red Wings since his retirement as a player in July 2006. Yzerman, who assembled the Canadian men's ice hockey team that won gold at the Vancouver Olympics earlier this year, will fill the post left vacant after Brian Lawton was fired by new owner Jeff Vinik in April. Vinik also fired coach Rick Tocchet in a front office shake-up for a team that missed the playoffs for the third straight year. Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009, Yzerman won three Stanley Cups as a player (1997, 1998, 2002) and one more as management (2008).
