Cup and Olympic gold different but special to Perry

Anaheim Ducks forward Corey Perry stepped up into the NHL's elite last season with a scintillating 50-goal, 98-point performance that lifted his team into the Stanley Cup Playoffs and sent Perry to Las Vegas for the 2011 NHL Awards, where he took home the Hart Trophy.

Although it was the best season of his career from an individual standpoint, Perry had already experienced the highest of highs from a team standpoint on both the League and international levels: Anaheim won the Cup in 2007, his sophomore season, and he was a member of the Canadian Olympic team that won gold in the 2010 Vancouver Games.

During his stop through the League's offices in midtown Manhattan on Thursday as part of this year's Player Media Tour, the 26-year-old attempted to compare and contrast the emotions that go into playing for and winning a Stanley Cup versus a gold medal.

"It's similar, but the Olympics are a two-week tournament, where the Stanley Cup is you go through 82 games -- seven, eight months with the same guys -- and then you go through the playoffs," Perry said. "With the Stanley Cup, you're going through a lot more blood, sweat and tears and different things. In the Olympics you have to gel so quickly and become a team in a short period of time. I don't know if you can say one's better than the other or one sits higher than the other. I think they're pretty special, both of them."

Perry was a key contributor to both efforts, putting up six goals and 15 points in the Ducks' 2007 postseason run and scoring four times as a member of Team Canada, including the goal that gave the host nation a 2-0 lead in an eventual 3-2 overtime win over the United States in the gold-medal game.

"Especially playing in your home country, winning in front of your home country fans is pretty special," he said. "But on the other side, we won the Cup in front of our fans in Southern California, so that was kind of exciting as well."