SM-liiga trophy copy repeatedly destroyed by players, goldsmith refuses further repairs

The goldsmith responsible for maintaining Finland’s SM-liiga championship trophy, the Kanada-malja, has stopped repairing its replica after decades of deliberate damage by winning teams, reports Finnish public broadcaster Yle.

Jyrki Karvinen, a master goldsmith from Tampere, has serviced the original trophy for over 30 years but has now refused to fix its copy, which is used by players during celebrations. The replica is frequently broken on purpose—a tradition Karvinen finds baffling. “I’ve never understood what’s so great about smashing it to pieces,” he said.

The original Kanada-malja, weighing nearly 20 kilograms, is handled with care and only briefly presented to the winning team on the ice. The replica, however, endures rough treatment: it has been burned, submerged in pools, struck against concrete, and had its wooden parts and figurines damaged or lost. “You name it, it’s happened,” Karvinen said.

He noted a shift in attitude over the decades. “Back then, it got rough handling, but it wasn’t intentional destruction. Now, players seem proud of who can wreck it the worst.” Karvinen admitted he misjudged the replica’s durability when he crafted it in 1992, assuming its reinforced structure would withstand abuse. “I was wrong,” he conceded.

After two decades of repairs, he stepped away from fixing the copy, frustrated that corrections never lasted. Today, he maintains only the original trophy—cleaning it, attaching new nameplates (which will run out of space in about a decade), and making minor adjustments. The original, donated by Finnish-Canadians in 1950, is preserved like a “relic” in the Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame in Tampere.

The SM-liiga finals conclude this week, with either KooKoo or Tappara claiming the championship—and the coveted, if fleeting, use of the Kanada-malja.