Chicago Blackhawks Page 11

  Toews took the Stanley Cup to Denny’s for breakfast.

  By that point, the party had been raging for about 12 hours. It wouldn’t stop for about 12 more days.

  * * *

  The best way to prevent a hangover is to just keep drinking, and that’s what the Blackhawks did, taking the most famous trophy in sports on an epic bar crawl the likes of which the city had never seen. The Blackhawks had youth, stamina, adrenaline, and an entire city on their side.

  “There was a lot of booze drank,” Ben Eager says.

  Even the older guys went all out.

  “It was insane,” Sopel says. “I didn’t sleep at all. Maybe a couple hours a night, tops. I was still living on adrenaline. I had been in the league a long time, and I finally got to fulfill a lifelong dream. Sleep was not what I was thinking about.”

  A group text string kept all the players in the loop. Toews, Sharp, and Burish were the ringleaders, sending out texts that they were ­taking the Cup here for an hour, there for a half hour, somewhere else for another drop-in. Players slept in shifts.

  “There was always a rotation of guys who went out,” Dave Bolland says. “Because you’d go out for one night, then you’d start to feel it, so you’d take a break and someone took your spot. Then you’d hit the next night. It was fun. Someone would throw out a text, ‘Okay, we’re all meeting at the tavern at this time.’ We just tried to take it to as many spots in Chicago as we could. Everybody was putting in their own two cents about where we should go and what we should do this day and that day. It was fun. We tried to take it to as many bars and restaurants as we could, so all of Chicago could experience the moment.”

  Social media wasn’t yet omnipresent in 2010, and there were no real-time Cup trackers on Twitter to tell fans where to find the Blackhawks. It became a game of cat and mouse, with the Blackhawks sneaking into quiet bars with the Cup, then leaving an hour or two later through a massive throng of humanity that inevitably—and instantly—appeared.

  At one point, the party bus that drove the Blackhawks and the Cup around stopped at Rockit Bar and Grill on Hubbard Street. They were there for maybe two minutes before the barricades were set up and half the city seemed to be trying to get in. Later that night, the Cup convoy spilled into Prosecco, a high-end Italian restaurant on Wells Street. In the middle of the festivities, Kris Versteeg and Adam Burish grabbed the Cup and ran outside, then did a lap around the block, unprotected, through hundreds, if not thousands, of fans.

  “The Cup guy was absolutely losing it,” Troy Brouwer says. “He’s supposed to be making sure the Cup was safe, and they were walking through the crowd with it. The guys didn’t care, they just wanted to share it with everyone in the city. Everything about that week or two was so much fun to be a part of.”

  The focal point of the Cup crawl was the so-called Viagra Triangle, the bar-laden area north of Chicago Avenue and south of Division Street, east of State Street and west of the diagonal Rush Street, which serves as the hypotenuse. It didn’t take long for fans to figure out that general area was their best bet for catching a glimpse of the Cup and the Blackhawks, so it didn’t take long for every stop to become a madhouse. Toews remembers leaving Gibson’s Steakhouse on the north tip of the triangle and heading to a couple of bars on Division.

  “We had cops everywhere, but they weren’t prepared for the crowd that had built up on the street, either,” Toews says. “They were trying their best to move us from one place to another, but the streets were packed with people. It was absolute madness. It just blew us away how much energy was behind the whole thing.”

  For those who had been with the team since the dark ages, it was even more amazing.

  “I remember my first game, there might have been 6,000 people in the United Center,” Bolland says. “You’re just thinking, Oh boy, this place is dead. What’s going on? And here we were walking out of bars, and there were that many people outside waiting for us every single time. It was crazy.”

  One night—who can remember which one it was?—Ben Eager, Bolland, Eager’s brother, and a police officer friend of theirs took the Cup to one of the rooftops overlooking Wrigley Field for a Cubs game. They stayed until the end of the game, which was a bad idea, because they were leaving—Cup in tow—at the same time as tens of thousands of Cubs fans. The cop did everything he could to try to manage the crowd and get the group into a taxi, but it was hairy for a few moments.

  “We legit almost lost it,” Eager says. “I mean, I’m sure we would have gotten it back, but it almost went crowd surfing for a while.”

  The party raged for more than a week. After a grueling 10-month grind, including 82 regular-season games and 22 postseason games, the “young and dumb” Blackhawks—as so many of them still refer to themselves back then—found the energy to just keep going, to keep drinking, to keep celebrating, to keep reveling in the moment they had dreamed about for their entire lives.

  “There’s an extra button in there,” says Bolland, who was one of the only guys who stuck around Chicago all summer, and just kept celebrating with fans after his teammates scattered home. “It’s just being satisfied, just having it over with, and having everything done. Winning the Stanley Cup gives you that extra boost of energy, and it just comes out. We did it. It’s over. We accomplished what we wanted to. We just kept going.”

  Then, Bolland pauses.

  “I think a few Red Bulls helped us out, as well.”

  * * *

  As fun and as rowdy and as crazy as the Cup crawl was, to a man, what sticks out about that memorable celebration was the parade. It was held on Friday morning—barely 24 hours after the team landed at O’Hare—and hardly anybody had slept yet. Brouwer remembers walking out of the United Center after the group took a drunken team picture with the Stanley Cup and seeing just a smattering of people wandering around Madison Street.

  “We’re like, ‘Oh great, is this what the parade is going to be like?’” Brouwer says.

  Then they crossed over the Washington Street bridge to the official parade route, between Wacker and Michigan, and up Michigan to the river.

  “As soon as we crossed the bridge into downtown, holy shit,” Brouwer says. “There were thousands and thousands of people on every street corner. Every time you passed a cross street, as far as you could see, it was just people in Blackhawks jerseys. It was amazing.”

  Official crowd estimates put the figure at 2 million people, or more than two-thirds the population of the entire city of Chicago. Ten tons of confetti—composed of shredded Sun-Times newspapers and red and black tissue paper—littered the streets. Twenty ­cannons joined the masses of fans dumping ticker tape onto Washington Street and Michigan Avenue.

  “The party and taking the Cup out and going to all those different places was unbelievable,” Sopel says. “But standing on that stage was something else. As far as you could see, every which way, all you saw was red. We’re on the bus looking down at all these people smashed together on these sidewalks. There were people climbing stop signs and light poles. I was blown away.”

  At the rally, the well-lubricated players returned all the love the fans had shown them.

  “It’s all you!” Toews shouted. “It’s all you.”

  “It’s been a long time between drinks,” Rocky Wirtz told the crowd, many of whom had waited 49 years for the moment.

  “What a day, what a ride,” Duncan Keith said. “Best time of my life right now.”

  Even the Blackhawks themselves were shocked by the passion and size of the crowd during the parade celebrating their 2010 Stanley Cup victory.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Patrick Kane told the crowd with a smirk. “I’ll try to keep my shirt on all summer. For all the cab drivers out there, I love you.”

  Yes, all was forgiven. All was celebrated. Four years removed from the dark ages—half-empty arenas, underfed players, blacked-out ho
me games, and, worst of all, complete indifference from a city that once bled Blackhawks red—Chicago was a hockey town once again.

  “It was unbelievable,” Sharp says. “Until you’ve understood what it was like in 2005, 2006, 2007, you can’t understand how amazing it was in 2010. It was a complete turnaround. It was like a movie.”

  And sequels were on the way.

  The Purge

  Brent Sopel couldn’t stand it anymore. The Blackhawks were in Vancouver, a few nights into their annual circus trip. Some 2,700 miles away, assistant general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff had been ­spotted in the press box of Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, and the rumor mill was churning. Sopel’s name had been bandied about on Hockey Night in Canada; Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, and Duncan Keith were waist-deep in negotiations for massive contract extensions; the salary cap was a growing concern for the surging Blackhawks; and Sopel didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  So he decided to find out. He found general manager Stan Bowman, and with all the grace, tact, and subtlety that marked his play on the ice, asked him a simple question.

  “Stan, what the fuck is going on?”

  Bowman, unflappable as ever, responded in his usual calm monotone.

  “We’re just trying to figure things out. We’re seeing what our options are.”

  Sopel, of course, didn’t end up getting traded that winter. But the looming specter of the first salary-cap reckoning in franchise history—a purge that was expedited by Dale Tallon’s qualifying-offer snafu at the end of the 2008–09 season, which cost the team millions in cap space—never really left the team. It hung over the franchise like the sword of Damocles, ready to fall and tear apart this perfect unit, this unicorn of a team, this incredibly talented, tight-knit group.

  It was coming. And everyone felt it.

  “One hundred percent,” Sopel says. “We all knew with those ­signings of Keith, Kane, and Toews that this team was one and done. This team was going to get exploded. They had identified their core, those three guys. So the rest of us were left wondering who’s going to go. It was something we couldn’t control. But we knew we had to win a Stanley Cup now. That was all we could control. It was just another reason we were able to bond together so well. We told each other, ‘This is a great team that isn’t going to be around much longer. Let’s make some noise.’”

  Even Joel Quenneville admits that he felt the pressure and the urgency to win it all in 2010, because the purge was coming. It wasn’t something that was discussed openly too often, but it was there in the back of everyone’s minds, coloring every game, every series, every missed opportunity. The future was unwritten, but in the minds of the Blackhawks, it was now or never.

  “We absolutely sensed it, but we didn’t talk about it much,” Colin Fraser says. “When guys have success, they get paid for it. And they get more and more every year. It’s one thing to take a haircut, but you can’t take a huge cut. Guys just don’t do that. They just plain and simple couldn’t pay guys. So we knew they’d have to dump salary. But personally, I didn’t know it was going to be as bad as it was.”

  It was bad. Real bad.

  It started on June 24, two weeks after Game 6 in Philadelphia. Barely enough time for the booze to clear out of their systems from the Cup crawl through Chicago. So many Blackhawks fans had just learned how to pronounce Dustin Byfuglien’s name, and he was gone—dealt to the lowly Atlanta Thrashers along with Ben Eager and Sopel for picks, prospects, and Marty Reasoner (who would be flipped to Florida almost immediately). That same day, Fraser was sent to Edmonton for a sixth-round pick.

  Five days later, Kris Versteeg was dealt to Toronto for Viktor Stalberg and a couple of prospects. A day after that, Andrew Ladd joined Byfuglien in Atlanta.

  When free agency opened on July 1, Adam Burish signed with the Dallas Stars. John Madden eventually signed with the Minnesota Wild. Goaltender Antti Niemi signed with the San Jose Sharks. Backup goalie Cristobal Huet went to Switzerland.

  Eight players who dressed in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final were gone, plus two more key guys in Burish and Fraser. The purge was amplified because of Jonathan Toews’ $1.3 million bonus for winning the Conn Smythe, which affected the 2010–11 cap because the Blackhawks had virtually no room left under the 2009–10 cap. Both Toews and Kane also hit all their entry-level contract bonuses, triggering another $5 million to factor in.

  “That was the end of it for a lot of us,” Ladd says.

  One of the few guys who got to stay was restricted free agent Niklas Hjalmarsson, and even he was almost gone. On July 10, San Jose Sharks general manager Doug Wilson gave Hjalmarsson a rare offer sheet, for four years at $14 million—a massive raise from the $666,000 the defenseman was making on his entry-level deal. Hjalmarsson looked around at all the free-agent carnage going on and signed it, thinking it was the wisest decision.

  “The team was getting split up,” Hjalmarsson says. “That was a big moment in my career. I honestly thought that I was going to be a San Jose Shark for the next four years. I was excited about it, but I had mixed emotions about it, too. I loved it in Chicago, and we had just won a Cup. I wanted to stay. But it’s a business, too, and I made a decision and I was pretty sure that I was going to leave the Blackhawks. Then, just a couple hours later, I found out that they were going to match it. I was even happier about that than the ­decision to sign it in the first place.”

  It was three days before Stan Bowman made it official that Hjalmarsson wasn’t going anywhere. Wilson had basically forced him to choose between Hjalmarsson and Antti Niemi, who had ­backstopped the Blackhawks to the championship. As good and as promising as Niemi was, Bowman knew he had Corey Crawford coming up in the system. And he knew he didn’t have another Hjalmarsson.

  “I couldn’t replace him,” Bowman says. “We had nobody internally that could come up and play that role, and we weren’t going to be able to get somebody who could help us in the market for less than his offer sheet. We had to keep him.”

  Bowman made the right call, as Hjalmarsson evolved into one of the top defensive defensemen in the game, with his name on the Stanley Cup three times by the time he turned 29. Niemi went on to become an average goalie with the Sharks and Dallas Stars, never again sniffing the kind of success he had in Chicago. For all the ­difficult decisions the Blackhawks had to make that summer, the one that didn’t involve parting with a player might have been the best.

  “I’m sure I would have had a great time in San Jose, as well,” Hjalmarsson says. “But I can’t see having a better time than we had in Chicago.”

  Hjalmarsson stayed, but the team was gutted. And so were the players left behind.

  “We had an idea something would happen when the whole ­qualifying-offer thing happened [the year before], and we knew we had the two young guys, Kane and Toews, who were going to get pretty ­substantial raises,” Troy Brouwer says. “But the salary cap was still pretty new, and I don’t think the players understood the growth ­factor and how the cap would change year to year. You’re just under the assumption that you’re going to be hanging out and playing hockey with your friends. The next thing you know, half of them are gone.”

  “It was tough after they all got traded,” Patrick Kane says. “Some of those guys were like your best friends that you would hang out with the most, like Versteeg. And I was really close with Burish, as well. We’ll still talk about that 2010 team sometimes, and just kind of laugh at certain stories. A lot of those guys are still missed.”

  The Blackhawks survived, of course. They withstood another purge the following summer—gone were Brouwer, Brian Campbell, Tomas Kopecky, Nick Boynton, and others—but started ­plugging the holes from within and without. After winning the Stanley Cup again in 2013, they dealt away Dave Bolland. After the 2014 season, young defenseman Nick Leddy was a cap casualty. And after winning yet another championship in 2015, Patrick Sharp was the first t
hree-time champ the Blackhawks had to deal away, and young star Brandon Saad was shipped to Columbus. Bowman adapted, adjusted, rejiggered, and retooled year after year, keeping the Blackhawks on top of the league. The core remained, and the success continued.

  But for those 2010 cap casualties, the transition wasn’t so easy. Particularly for the quartet that was sent down south to Atlanta. Ladd, Byfuglien, Sopel, and Eager were all in the lineup opening night in Atlanta, with Ladd scoring a goal in the Thrashers’ 4–2 ­victory over the Washington Capitals. There were 15,596 fans in attendance at Phillips Arena.

  For their next home game, 11 days later, there were 8,820 fans. Two nights later, 9,138 fans. The Thrashers finished fourth in the Southeast Division, 12th in the Eastern Conference. They never sniffed the playoffs, and their lack of success was met with a collective shrug by the citizens of Atlanta.

  From the dark ages to the golden age and back to a new dark age in four short years.

  “It was tough,” Ladd says. “You have so much fun winning hockey games. Talk to anybody and the most fun you’re going to have ­playing hockey is when you win games and have the type of ­season we had had the year before. So any time you go from that high to a non-traditional hockey market, it’s tough. In terms of the amenities and everything that we had in Chicago, it was different. In terms of the attention from fans, it was different.”

  There was a brief moment of hope when the four of them were all sent to the Thrashers together, that maybe they could help steer Atlanta in the right direction. But the reality check of playing hockey in Georgia was a harsh one.

  “It was kind of depressing to not be going back to Chicago the year after you win,” Eager says. “And it was really depressing once you got to Atlanta. The one comforting thing was there were four of us who went. But it was tough to get excited to play, to be ­honest. You’re going from the best team to the worst team, and definitely the ­smallest fan base. The fans who were there were great, but there weren’t a lot of them. It’s like warmups the whole game.”