Championship ring

A championship ring is a ring presented to members of winning teams in North American professional sports leagues, and college tournaments.

Since only one championship trophy is awarded by the league to the winning team, championship rings are distributed as a collectible memento for the actual players and team officials to keep for themselves to symbolize the victory. Winners' medals (and runners-up medals) are not awarded in North American professional sports, in contrast to Olympic team sports and European club association football tournaments such as the Premier League and UEFA Champions League.

In addition, the championship in North American pro team sports is the culmination of the regular season and playoff tournament, while in European club football the league championship and domestic/continental cups are separate competitions. For North American pro teams, the playoff league championship is the single most significant part of the season. Indeed, most teams and fans in North America do not consider division titles or conference titles to be notable honors at all, and therefore in practice teams in major North American professional sports consider themselves to compete annually for only a single honor, the league championship, which is determined by a playoff tournament that is seeded based on regular season performance. This is in sharp contrast to European football clubs who celebrate and compete for both regular-season "league" titles and playoff tournament "cups", as well as international tournaments in some cases.

In North American sports vernacular, a player's aim of wanting the "ring" is synonymous with winning the playoff league championship, and it has entered popular lexicon (retired basketball center Shaquille O'Neal was quoted as saying "My motto is very simple: Win a Ring for the King", former NHL goaltender Patrick Roy remarking "I can't hear what Jeremy says, because I've got my two Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears").

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