If the playoffs are the main course of a hockey season, perhaps it’s fitting that the Minnesota Wild’s journey to securing a wooden puck holder shaped like the Stanley Cup started with an appetizer: Charcuterie boards.
Marcus Foligno first noticed the wooden charcuterie boards made with the Minnesota Wild logo, red line and blue lines at the Wild Foundation’s Whiskey and Wine events. The team signed them for fans to bid on during the auctions.
Season ticket holder Matthew Lange made them, even gifting one to Foligno following an event.
“These are really cool,” Foligno said. “Then I was like, I’ve got to reach out to this guy. Because everyone you see around the league has some sort of puck holder. "
“We had a bucket one time, where we put the pucks in a bucket. I think it was bad karma for going far in the playoffs. You didn’t have a Stanley Cup holder, so why would you fill it?”
The Wild have their wooden Stanley Cup puck holder for this year’s playoffs, hopefully changing up the karma, all thanks to Lange and his woodworking skills. He created the wooden piece specifically for the Wild.
It’s shaped like a Stanley Cup and includes a small Wild logo and “2026 playoffs” around 16 slots for pucks signifying the 16 necessary wins to secure the actual Stanley Cup.
“It’s cool,” Foligno said. “You get some fan engagement that way. It’s special to him, it’s special to us. The boys have loved it.”
Lange, of Hugo, has been a Wild season ticket holder for the past few years. He started woodworking about six years ago, as a hobby he could do in his garage for fun, usually at night after his job as a maintenance technician at a power plant.
His hobby-turned-business started with some charcuterie boards and other items for friends. Eventually, after word of mouth and some social media traction, he started his own woodworking business called Rough Sanded Woodworking.
“The whole process is just very therapeutic for me,” Lange said.
It’s a hobby that’s blossomed into a huge social media following, which grew even more when Foligno gave Lange and Rough Sanded Woodworking a shoutout during a postgame interview with the TNT broadcast crew following Game 6 of the first-round series.
“He made us a bunch of stuff and then this year, he’s like, ‘I got something great for you guys,’” Foligno said in the interview. “It was awesome. It’s been awesome to get someone like that, a season ticket holder involved.”
Lange made a playoffs puck holder for the team last year, too. It was a simple box with four slots and the 2024-25 team’s theme “Hard” etched into each slot. That was done on a bit more of a time crunch, since the Wild didn’t officially make the playoffs until the end of the season.
This year left Lange with a bit more breathing room to create the wooden Stanley Cup. They bounced around ideas before Foligno came back with: “Hey, what about something shaped like the Stanley Cup?”
“I was like ‘yeah, I could do that,’” Lange said.
He used canarywood – denser and sturdier than plywood – and laid out the generic outline design of a Stanley Cup on his computer and put it into the CNC machine to cut it out.
He created the spaces for 16 pucks while also being mindful of keeping the entire piece compact, since he knew it would travel on the road with the team. He only had one actual game puck for reference, which made it a bit of a challenge, he said.
“Promotional pucks are different,” Lange said. “The printing on the sides is different. The size is different.”
Cutting it out of the machine took around an hour, followed by three hours of sanding; “that’s the fun part,” Lange said.
Being a hockey fan and using his hobby to have a partnership with the Wild in this way is “unreal,” Lange said.
“I tell my wife every day, ‘what world am I living in here?’” Lange said. “’How did I get to this position?"
“It’s surreal. It’s definitely an honor.”
Lange got this year’s puck holder to the Wild right before they left for Dallas to face the Stars in the first-round playoff series. The puck holder wasn’t empty for long, after a 6-1 win in Game 1.
It’s temporarily taken the place of the Redwood Hat the Wild awarded to the player of the game throughout the season, and that player in the playoffs does the honors of placing the puck in the wooden cup.
“You always need something like that to kind of come around with as a whole team, you can gather around something,” Foligno said. “You might think it’s the reason why you’re winning. There’s a lot of superstition in this league, in sports.”
Jesper Wallstedt, with his first career playoff win in net, did the honors of placing the first game puck into the holder. The Wild have shared videos and photos of the puck holder on social media after wins in the playoffs. Wallstedt took a couple of attempts to make sure the puck was secured.
“He (Matt) was laughing because he saw one of us try to smash it in,” Foligno said. “He’s like, ‘I’m sorry, man. They fit, but sometimes there’s a little bit of fragments left over.’
“Yeah, he did a good job.”
Lange first connected with Foligno about four years ago, after Lange had reached out to the Wild Foundation about donating some of his woodworking items. Foligno was the host of the Whiskey and Wine event, so Lange obliged the Foundation’s request to make a charcuterie board as a gift for Foligno.
The two kept in touch after that.
“He’s got unbelievable stuff,” Foligno said, adding that he’s asked Lange for charcuterie boards, too. “He’s a good guy to know.”
The Wild filled up one side of the cup with pucks after a series win over Dallas. The dream, of course, is to fill each slot with a puck from a Wild playoff win. Foligno said if that happens, they’ll put the cup holder in a glass case. Or maybe they’ll return the favor, sign it and gift it back to Lange.
“That would be incredible,” Lange said.
