Chicago Blackhawks: Stories from the Chicago Blackhawks' Ice, Locker Room, and Press Box Read online

  For my dad, Steve, for instilling in me a love of hockey, a love of sportswriting, and a love of terrible puns. The way I am? It’s all his fault.

  And for my mom, Karen, for always believing in me and for relentlessly pushing me to believe in myself. Here it is, Mom: my first book. You can finally stop nagging me about writing one.

  Contents

  Foreword by Denis Savard

  Introduction

  1. Rising from the Ashes

  2. 2009–10: Young, Dumb, and So Much Fun

  3. 2010–12: The Lost Seasons

  4. 2013: The Sprint Cup

  5. 2013–15: The Endless Slog

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword by Denis Savard

  After the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 2010, our first in almost 50 years, I got a phone call asking me to come down to the United Center. John McDonough, the team president, and ­marketing director Pete Hassen sat me down and went about sizing my finger for a ring. I was shocked.

  I was getting a ring?

  My name is on the Stanley Cup because I won one in 1993 with Montreal, which is where I grew up. I’m very thankful for that. But I always wanted a Blackhawks Stanley Cup ring. My only goal with this team was to win a Cup, and it bugged me that I wasn’t able to get that done as a player or as a coach.

  I have to tell you, being thought of that way by John and Pete was pretty touching. Here I was, a team ambassador, and I was getting a ring. I wore it with pride.

  Today, I’ve got three of them.

  Looking back a decade ago, I had no idea the Blackhawks organization would evolve into what it is today. We had missed the playoffs nine out of the previous 10 seasons. The office staff was small—the bare minimum, really. The franchise certainly didn’t seem like one that was on its way to glory. But I knew that if someone was able to come in and change a little bit of the culture, the Blackhawks could be something great.

  Here we are now. We’ve won three championships and established ourselves as one of the premier operations in the National Hockey League.

  Other teams look at us, at what we’ve accomplished during this period, and strive to duplicate it. And I know every one of them will tell you that they want to win. Of course they do. But no organization—from chairman Rocky Wirtz, John McDonough, and the other front office leaders to Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, Patrick Kane, and the rest of the core group on the ice and in the locker room—is as committed to winning, and that’s made the difference.

  I’ve had the privilege to spend almost 40 years with the team that drafted me: first as a player, then as a coach, and now as an ­ambassador. I’ve seen a lot in my years here. What has helped make the Blackhawks successful isn’t just that they conduct themselves with the utmost class, it’s that they always find a way to make things work. Having seen it up close, I can tell you that this is a franchise full of people who don’t have “no” in their vocabularies. It’s a ship that’s run with “yes.”

  You could offer me all the money in the world to go and run another hockey team and I wouldn’t take it. There’s just something about this group of Blackhawks players and staff that makes you want to stay here forever. And now we truly have a tradition to be followed and emulated forever. I was fortunate to play with so many talented teammates on some amazing teams in Chicago, but this recent collection of champions will always be remembered and honored.

  So enjoy it. Enjoy this run, because it’s rare. Celebrate what this team has done. Celebrate what they’re doing. Celebrate what’s to come, because the run isn’t over yet. Most of all, just celebrate, because we are all a part of something incredible.

  —Denis Savard

  Introduction

  Patrick Sharp remembers how bad it was.

  He remembers hosting a blood drive with Duncan Keith in 2007, the two future stars wandering around Millennium Station wearing bright-red Blackhawks jerseys with their names on them, ­trying to hand out free tickets and failing miserably. Even with their own names on the backs, nobody knew who the hell either of them was.

  “People were just annoyed that we were in the way,” Sharp recalls. “They were trying to catch their train and get home. They couldn’t have cared less that two of the Blackhawks were there, trying to get them to go to a game.”

  In fact, every Blackhawks player back in the mid-2000s was handed a stack of 1,000 business cards with their names on them, as if they were real-estate agents or lawyers. On the back of each card was a code that could be used to get two free tickets to any game. The players would stand in subway stations. They’d stand outside the United Center. They’d stand near parks and restaurants and movie theaters. Free Blackhawks tickets, from the Blackhawks themselves.

  They couldn’t give them away. Brent Sopel gave them out in lieu of Halloween candy one year.

  “Nobody wanted them,” Dave Bolland says. “Nobody cared. Those were dark times.”

  * * *

  Adam Burish remembers how bad it was.

  He remembers going to pick up his gear at the end of his first season, expecting to find a swanky leather hockey bag with the Blackhawks’ famous Indian-head logo stitched into the side.

  “It was in a garbage bag—a brown garbage bag,” Burish says. “They wouldn’t even give us a hockey bag. I thought I was going to be the stud going back to Wisconsin for the summer with my sweet Blackhawks bag, but they said, ‘We don’t give out hockey bags here, because we don’t want to lose them.’ A hundred and fifty bucks. They couldn’t shell out a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  That went for everybody, not just no-name rookies. The Bill Wirtz Blackhawks never spent a dime that didn’t need to be spent.

  “The budget was a little different back then,” Sharp says. “At the end of the year, one of the cool things about being an NHLer is you go back to the city you grew up in with all your stuff. I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario. At the time, there were five or six guys from there in the league. So you walk into a summer skate and you see a Vancouver Canucks bag or a Montreal Canadiens bag. I showed up with just a plain black Canadian Tire bag. It didn’t even have a Blackhawks logo on it. And whatever was on your stick rack for that last game of the season is what you took home for the summer. So I got three partially used sticks for my summer stock. Coming from Philadelphia, that was definitely an eye-opener.”

  * * *

  Brent Sopel remembers how bad it was.

  Sopel made his NHL debut in Chicago on April 5, 1999, just two seasons into the Blackhawks’ dark ages—a stretch that saw them make the playoffs just once, and win just one playoff game, in a 10-year span—as a starry-eyed defenseman for the Vancouver Canucks.

  His teammates had clued him in that Chicago was one of every NHL player’s favorite stops in the league. There were great ­restaurants, familiar bars, high-end shops. Everything was great about Chicago. Well, everything except the game itself.

  “We always circled Chicago as a trip we wanted to go on, because we’re gonna go party,” Sopel says. “But the last thing anyone wanted to do was go to the United Center and play hockey. There was nobody there. It was an awful place to play. Just no energy at all. Every night was Empty Seat Night. Nobody cared.”

  There was another reason, too. One Sopel learned immediately during his debut.

  “Every night they’d dress 20 guys, and 19 of them were fight
ers—even the backup goalie,” Sopel says with a laugh. “I’m in the starting lineup with Donald Brashear and Bryan McCabe, looking across at Brad Brown, Bob Probert, and all these guys. I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna die tonight. But hey, I can say I died a happy man, because I played one NHL game in my life.’”

  * * *

  Connor Carrick remembers how bad it was.

  Actually, he doesn’t remember much. That’s just how bad it was. The native of Chicago suburb Orland Park and a future NHL player can think back to his childhood and conjure vivid pictures of Joe Sakic and the Colorado Avalanche racing down the ice. He can still see those great Detroit Red Wings teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s. He remembers going to card conventions as a kid and ­searching for as many Pavel Bures as he could find.

  As for his hometown team? The one that played at the arena at which his mom’s family had been vending beer and snacks and T-shirts and anything else for decades?

  He’s got nothing.

  “No, nothing,” he says. “Because they weren’t on TV. I couldn’t name anybody from the ’90s. We were around the rink all the time because of my mom’s family, but you just couldn’t be a fan because you couldn’t catch them on TV. I mean, I can remember a few names—Daze, Amonte, Thibault, Zhamnov—but I don’t remember ­watching them. Nobody cared.”

  * * *

  Brent Seabrook remembers how bad it was.

  But he didn’t realize it at the time. He came up to the NHL the year following the 2004–05 lockout that wiped out the entire ­season. The lockout followed the nadir of the dark ages, when the Blackhawks won just 20 games, their worst season in half a century, dating back to when teams played only 70 games a season, not 82.

  He didn’t know that most NHL teams had charter flights with all first-class seats. He didn’t know that most NHL teams stayed in five-star hotels. He didn’t know that most NHL teams provided breakfast on the road. He didn’t know that most NHL teams had healthy and hearty food in the dressing room after games. He didn’t know that most NHL teams had more than 10 or 15 employees beyond the roster.

  He didn’t know the National Hockey League wasn’t supposed to feel an awful lot like the Western Hockey League.

  “I was just excited to be able to take a plane instead of a bus,” Seabrook says.

  More than a decade later, as he assembles a burrito bowl from Chipotle from a catered spread following a road practice and prepares to head back to the Ritz-Carlton on the company dime, the dark ages are little more than a fuzzy memory—in some ways, a running joke among teammates; in other ways, a helpful reminder for him and Duncan Keith, the last remnants of those times, to never take for granted all the luxuries they now enjoy.

  “Duncs and I laugh about it all the time,” Sharp says. “Can you imagine if the Blackhawks asked us to go stand in the train station now with our jerseys on, giving tickets away?”

  “It’d be a mob scene,” Burish says.

  Since the death of Bill Wirtz—a hugely important figure in the hockey world at large, but a complicated and even reviled figure in the hockey world of Chicago—and the takeover of the team by his son, Rocky Wirtz, in 2007, the Blackhawks have completed one of the most remarkable turnarounds in sports history. They’ve gone from dormant to dominant, hopeless to peerless. They spend money like no other team, and they make money like few other teams. They’ve won three Stanley Cups, reached two more conference finals, have piled up a Hart Trophy, two Norris Trophies, two Calder Trophies, a Selke Trophy, and put three current players on the NHL’s 100 Greatest Players list. They’ve sold out more than 400 straight games.

  They’re the benchmark, the bar, the league’s standard-bearer—leaned on heavily to prop up TV ratings on Wednesday nights, and to sell tickets for outdoor games, and to hawk merchandise online.

  In a six-week span in the fall of 2007, Rocky Wirtz took over the franchise, John McDonough left the Chicago Cubs to become president of the Blackhawks, and Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane made their NHL debuts.

  The rest is history, and history is still being written.

  “I’m glad I was there to see both sides of it, because I think it makes me appreciate it quite a bit more,” Seabrook says. “But I don’t think the boys would want to go back to the way it was.”

  1. Rising from the Ashes

  A New Sherriff in Town

  Adam Burish doesn’t remember who else was in the meeting. He just remembers John McDonough. McDonough has a way of dominating the room that way—the commanding presence, the authority figure, the man in charge, an imposing man who can impose his will. Even if you’ve just met him, you can tell you don’t want to be on his bad side.

  So when McDonough sat down with Burish and a couple of his teammates early during the 2007–08 season, shortly after he was brought in by new owner Rocky Wirtz to turn the Blackhawks from a bare-bones laughingstock into an actual professional organization, the conversation didn’t get very far very quickly.

  “What can change around here? What do you guys need?” McDonough asked.

  To Burish, it felt like a trap.

  “We were like, ‘Oh everything’s good, John. Everything’s great. Cool. The NHL! The Blackhawks! Yeah! Everything’s great!”

  McDonough leaned in.

  “This is your chance. I’m not judging. You’re not complaining. You’re not bitching. What do you guys need? Because we’re going to get it for you. All of it.”

  The players looked around at each other nervously for a moment, their silence deafening. Finally, it all came spilling out, like kindergartners who were just asked what they wanted at the candy store, their voices overlapping as they ran off a wish list they had been ­privately building among themselves for years:

  “We need a new plane! We need better food! We need food after games! We need food before practices! We need a real ­practice rink!”

  Coming from the Cubs, a team that had had its share of on-field misery but that had just come off a Central Division ­championship, McDonough couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Here were ­professional athletes, making millions of dollars, and they had no food to eat in the dressing room after killing themselves for 60 ­minutes on a game night. And once they got on the plane, they got a brick of ­mac-and-cheese and a cold ham sandwich. They didn’t have enough sticks to go around some days. They didn’t have T-shirts or hats to wear back home, or while talking on camera to reporters.

  The Chicago Blackhawks weren’t deemed the worst franchise in professional sports by ESPN in 2004 for nothing.

  McDonough soon visited the team at the Edge Ice Arena in ­suburban Bensenville, looked at the cramped quarters and minor-league environment, and shook his head.

  “This is all going to be gone,” McDonough told his players. “This is all going to change. We’re not going to be in something like this for long.”

  For the Blackhawks players, after years of being told “no,” of being told to shut up and keep your head down and be grateful you’re in the NHL at all, it was jarring to be told “yes” over and over and over again. It was motivating, too.

  It was also kind of terrifying. That’s part of the genius of McDonough.

  “All of a sudden, as players, we’re all thinking the same thing,” Burish recalls. “Holy shit. We’ve got to play good now.”

  From his North Side office, McDonough didn’t truly know how bad things were on the West Side. And frankly, he didn’t want to know. Even with ownership in transition, McDonough felt secure and happy with the Cubs. The team was winning, the fan base was enormous, the reach was global, and business was booming. As a lifelong resident of the Chicago area and a 24-year executive with the Cubs, McDonough knew the power and stability of the Cubs brand.

  So when McDonough received a call from a Rocky Wirtz ­confidante as he was preparing to head to Orlando for the general managers meetings in early November, he was in
no mood to chat. McDonough was still stinging from the first-round sweep the Cubs suffered at the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks. The ­conversation was over before it began.

  About 30 seconds later, McDonough’s phone rang again.

  “I talked to Rocky, and he really, really wants to meet with you,” the emissary said.

  McDonough’s curiosity sufficiently piqued, he met Wirtz at Champps, a bar/restaurant in suburban Schaumburg. For 45 minutes or so, the two chatted amiably about business philosophies and family and other small talk. Finally, Wirtz tipped his hand.

  “John, I want you to run the Blackhawks, and I really don’t have a Plan B,” he said.

  For four more hours, the two hashed out their concerns and goals, their fears and dreams. McDonough didn’t sugarcoat things.

  “I’d have to have total autonomy,” he told Wirtz. “I’ll keep you in the loop, always, but total autonomy. Nobody’s sacred. And of course, we have to put all home games on television.”

  For Blackhawks fans, the television debate was the single most divisive issue—worse than penny-pinching in free agency, worse than alienating former players and driving fan favorites out of town, worse than ­losing year after year. It was 2007, for Christ’s sake, and Chicagoans couldn’t see Blackhawks home games on TV. It was an Arthur Wirtz policy that his son, Bill Wirtz, stuck with. The philosophy was that you shouldn’t give away for free what you charge people to see live. The effect was the alienation of an existing fan base and a failure to raise a new generation of fans.

  For all of his contributions to the league and his generous efforts in the community, Bill Wirtz was booed posthumously at the United Center during a ceremony to commemorate his legacy.

  “You’ve got to respect a guy who stood by his values,” Brent Sopel says. “He was very old school. He said, ‘If you’re buying ­tickets, you’re going to see the game. These guys aren’t buying tickets, so why would I show them the game?’ Obviously, he was a very smart businessman—look at what he created, look what he had. I respect his views on that kind of thing, and loyalty. Did he cut corners? Absolutely. Why? Because he was trying to make money. He wasn’t cutting ­corners to be an asshole. They were making money. It was a ­business. But the effect was, players were getting screwed and not getting treated right. Fans, too. That all changed when Rocky took over and brought in John. They saw this huge thing on the horizon.”