Keenan wins another Cup, this one in Russia

FORMER FLYERS coach Mike Keenan has another Cup: The Gagarin Cup.

Keenan, whose first NHL head-coaching job was with the Flyers in the mid-1980s, coached Metallurg Magnitogorsk to the Kontinental Hockey League championship yesterday.

Metallurg beat Lev Prague, 7-4, in Game 7, making Keenan the first North American coach to win the Gagarin Cup and the first to win the NHL and KHL championships. Keenan won the Stanley Cup with the Rangers in 1994, his only season with the team.

He amassed 672 wins in the NHL with eight teams, including the Flyers (1984-88), who he led to the Stanley Cup finals twice (lost to Edmonton in both '85 and '87). He last coached in the NHL with Calgary from 2007 to '09.

The 63-year-old Keenan is in the first year of a 2-year deal with the Russian team, based in Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

After the game, Keenan and assistant coach Ilya Vorobyev stood in the middle of a jubilant locker room singing a song in Russian. Later, Keenan and two other staffers did their best Frank Sinatra imitation.

A smiling Keenan could be heard on a YouTube video crooning: "I did it my way."

Hasn't he always?

Donald Sterling, banned NBA owner and alleged racist, can't stay out of the news.

Yesterday, UCLA announced it was returning a $425,000 donation from Sterling and refusing to accept the remainder of a $3 million pledge for kidney research at the school.

But that's not all.

The school said in a statement that a full page in Sunday's Los Angeles Times - in which UCLA thanked Sterling for the generous donation - was taken out by Sterling, not the school. UCLA also said that that the ad's claim that it would name a research lab in Donald and Shelly Sterling's honor was false.

It's a shame he can't be banned from the human race, too.