Though he didn't win a Cup, he came close a couple of times. He was with the Calgary Flames in 1988-89, but was traded to the North Stars during that season and wasn't part of the Flames' Cup-winning team. In 1990-91, the North Stars had a 2-1 series lead over the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Cup finals before losing in six.
But perhaps the 1994 playoffs should be mentioned too, even though his Dallas Stars were eliminated in only five games by the Vancouver Canucks in the Western Conference Semi-Finals.
The date: May 4, 1994. Game Two of the series against Vancouver. The Canucks won 3-0 to take a 2-0 series lead, but there was controversy as Churla was a victim of a vicious elbow delivered by Vancouver's Pavel Bure to his head. Churla went down immediately, but there was no penalty on Bure. There was also no suspension handed down afterward. Churla ended up not missing a game, but had Bure been suspended, the outcome of the series might have been different.
Who knows? Dallas might have won the series had Bure been forced to sit out a few games.
As Al Strachan noted in "Don Cherry's Hockey Stories and Stuff," the Canucks caught a break as Bure surprisingly was not suspended, and would go on to guide the team to within a game of winning the Stanley Cup. "Astonishingly," Strachan noted, "no suspension was handed down by Brian Burke, who was in charge of NHL discipline at the time. ... Had the Canucks been deprived of Bure's services, they might not have made their subsequent run to the Stanley Cup final against the New York Rangers." [1]
Here is the clip of Bure's elbow to Churla's head, courtesy hockeyfightguy:
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[1] Don Cherry's Hockey Stories and Stuff, p. 197.
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