Chicago Blackhawks Page 12

  But for some of the Blackhawks who scattered to the winds after the 2010 Stanley Cup run, it was a blessing in disguise. Role ­players became stars. Ladd went from a third-liner with the Blackhawks to the captain of the Winnipeg Jets, rescued and airlifted to a ­buzzing hockey market by the franchise’s relocation. Byfuglien became an All-Star there. Versteeg became a top-liner in Florida before ­returning to Chicago for another championship in 2015.

  “It was hard, but I don’t think I would trade it, either,” Ladd says. “It wasn’t ideal, and everyone would have loved to have stayed in Chicago. But a lot of guys got more opportunities going elsewhere. I wouldn’t have played top-six minutes if I stayed in Chicago. Buff wouldn’t have played top-pairing minutes. You maybe don’t go on to become the player you became if you don’t get those opportunities.”

  But there will always be that what-if in the backs of the minds of everyone associated with that 2010 team. What if there hadn’t been a salary cap? What if the Blackhawks could have kept the gang together, and added parts along the way, and become a super team? A true dynasty? What if the winning—and the fun—never stopped?

  “You can’t help but think about those things,” Bolland says. “You see around the league now, you can get two or three or four years tops before they get broken up. That’s it. I think we knew that in 2010, and we knew we were going to win then or never do it together. I’m glad we did it.”

  In other words, you can think about what could have been, but, hey, what happened was pretty special, anyway.

  3. 2010–12: The Lost Seasons

  BEEP…BEEP…BEEP.

  The Blackhawks blew it. There was no other way to look at it.

  After a season of transition, plugging so many holes left by the summer cap purge, they needed a point against the hated Detroit Red Wings in the early afternoon on April 10, 2011, in Game No. 82, to clinch a playoff spot. Just one point. It was a home game. It was against a team that was missing star center Henrik Zetterberg. It was against a team that already was cemented as the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference. It was against a team with nothing to play for.

  And they blew it.

  The Blackhawks lingered in the dressing room longer than usual after the 4–3 loss, trying to wrap their brains around how it had happened, how they could go from Stanley Cup champions to ­missing the playoffs in 10 months. Oh, technically, there was hope. If the Minnesota Wild could beat the Dallas Stars later that night, the Blackhawks would back into the playoffs. But the Wild were bad, and were ravaged by injuries, with several AHL call-ups in the lineup as they played out the string.

  Defenseman Brian Campbell, a day earlier, said matter-of-factly, “I know Dallas is going to win their game.” It was that sure a thing. In fact, it was so sure a thing, Troy Brouwer and some of his teammates already had put together plans for a year-end party. Dinner was ordered. Drinks, too. It was all set up.

  Brouwer and John Scott, who lived a couple of blocks away from each other, didn’t know what to do with themselves that night, so they went down to the Pony Inn to have a beer and watch the Stars-Wild game. When they saw the lineup the Wild were putting on the ice, they needed another beer.

  “Oh, shit, Minnesota’s pretty much playing their minor-league team against Dallas, who was a good hockey team,” Brouwer recalls. “At that point, we pretty much realized that we were going to be out of the playoffs.”

  Hockey’s a funny game, though. The Wild kids took it to the Stars, and somehow pulled out a 5–3 victory, allowing the Blackhawks to sneak into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed. By the time the Blackhawks’ media-relations staff put together a conference call with Joel Quenneville for reporters, it was pretty clear that Quenneville had written off the season, too. The normally tight-lipped coach was, let’s say, looser than usual, his voice jumping octaves and his tone downright giddy.

  “I’ve never been more excited after a hockey game in my life that I didn’t participate in,” Quenneville said. “I was acting like a two-year-old, celebrating—maybe a three-, four-, or five-year-old—­celebrating his birthday. I was shocked.”

  A couple of days later, the Wild had their own end-of-year party, and Andrew Brunette—who played three seasons for Quenneville in Colorado—hosted. The next morning, Brunette was trudging around the house, picking up beer cans and cleaning up the mess while ­nursing a massive headache.

  Then he heard some beeping.

  “I turn around and look outside, and there’s a Bud Light truck backing up,” Brunette says. “I’m like, ‘What the hell is this? The party was yesterday.’ I’m hung over. A beer’s the last thing I want to see at this point.”

  Well, he got another beer. Twelve cases of them, to be exact. They came with a note.

  “Thanks,” it read. “Joel Quenneville.”

  Ready to Riot

  As a team employee, Blackhawks radio play-by-play man John Wiedeman isn’t really supposed to say anything controversial. As a student of hockey history, the man couldn’t help himself.

  Wiedeman was doing an interview with WGN Radio from O’Hare, just before the Blackhawks’ flight to Vancouver for Game 7 of what had turned into an epic first-round series between the two archrivals. Wiedeman was asked what he would do if the Blackhawks somehow pulled this series out.

  “Truthfully?” Wiedeman said. “I’m staying right in that building for about three hours, because the people in that town will rip the city apart. It won’t be safe to walk any of the streets in Vancouver.”

  Wiedeman was prophetic, but only to a point.

  Indeed, the tension in the city was inescapable. The Blackhawks had ended the Canucks’ season in each of the past two seasons, and the hatred between the two clubs was real and it was palpable. But in 2011, the Canucks were the Presidents’ Trophy winners and the Blackhawks were a gutted team that had backed into the postseason on the last day of the season.

  And sure enough, the Canucks won the first three games of the series, with Roberto Luongo pitching a shutout in Game 1, and the Sedin twins toying with the Blackhawks in Games 2 and 3. Raffi Torres even knocked Brent Seabrook out for a couple of games with a vicious hit behind the Blackhawks net in Game 3. But noted Canucks nemesis Dave Bolland returned for Game 4 after missing more than a month with a concussion, and he turned the tide of the series with a goal and three assists in a cathartic 7–2 victory at the United Center in Game 4. The Blackhawks went back to Vancouver and won 5–0 in Game 5, chasing Luongo for the second straight game.

  And the tension in Vancouver started to mount. Vancouver coach Alain Vigneault started rookie Cory Schneider in Game 6 in Chicago, a startling concession that yes, the Blackhawks were indeed in Luongo’s head. But Schneider injured himself on a third-period penalty shot by Michael Frolik that tied the game at 3–3. And here came Luongo in relief.

  “The place is just going out of their fucking minds,” Wiedeman says. “And then we go to overtime and Ben Smith scores. We tie the series 3–3. If you’re the Vancouver fans, you’re on the edge. You’ve lost to the Blackhawks in consecutive seasons. The Blackhawks are the dragon. And you’re on the verge of blowing a 3–0 series lead to them.”

  Troy Brouwer is a Vancouver native. He was eight years old when the city melted down in the wake of the Canucks’ Game 7 loss to the New York Rangers in the 1994 Stanley Cup Final. According to the CBC, between 50,000 and 70,000 people took to the streets and did more than $1 million worth of damage. Two hundred people were injured, and 150 were arrested.

  A Blackhawks win in Game 7 could have made the 1994 riots and Montreal’s 1955 Maurice “Rocket” Richard riots—which stemmed from a season-ending suspension Richard received for hitting a linesman during a melee—look like tea parties.

  “It would have been crazy,” Bolland says. “Even with a few other teams we beat along the way, you would have thought the city was going to be burned down by the fans. But especially Va
ncouver. For us, those series were so much fun, just awesome games to be in. But I think the fans took it even more personally than we did.”

  The Blackhawks tried to block out the outside distraction.

  “I remember the riot in ’94, and we knew it was possible,” Brouwer says. “But I don’t think we were really concerned about that. We were pretty much focused on the game.”

  And what a game it was. Alexandre Burrows staked the Canucks to a 1–0 lead just 2:43 into the game. Burrows had a chance to put the series away when he was awarded a penalty shot just 21 seconds into the third after being tripped by Duncan Keith, but he shot wide. A Keith hooking penalty with just 3:17 left again seemed to seal the Blackhawks’ fate, but just like Nashville found out a year earlier, the Blackhawks don’t go away that easily.

  Toews, shorthanded, made an extraordinary little pass to Marian Hossa while tumbling over two Canucks defenders on the rush, then reached for the rebound while still flat on the ice to whack it in for the equalizer with just 1:56 left. It was happening again.

  “You’re not thinking destiny or anything like that,” Brouwer says. “But you have all the confidence in the world after something like that happens.”

  Twenty-four seconds into overtime, Burrows took a holding penalty. Toews fed Patrick Sharp for a golden chance from the left circle that Luongo got his blocker on. Suddenly, Wiedeman wasn’t worried about a riot anymore. He was worried that the Blackhawks had squandered their best opportunity.

  “That was our chance,” he says. “That was it.”

  Less than five minutes later, Burrows—like Hossa in Nashville—got to be the hero shortly after taking what could have been a ­catastrophic penalty. Chris Campoli had the puck, with time and space, along the boards in his own end. But he shanked the clearing attempt, and Burrows swatted it out of the air, raced in on rookie goaltender Corey Crawford—who was so instrumental down the stretch in even getting the Blackhawks to the playoffs—and slapped a rising shot in front of a desperately lunging Campoli that found the upper far corner of the net.

  The Canucks had slain the dragon, exorcised the demons, gotten the monkey off their backs. All the clichés.

  “And I remember sitting there in the booth, thinking to myself, Well, at least I’ll get back to the hotel safely tonight,” Wiedeman says now, with gallows humor.

  But he was right in the end. The Canucks went all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, only to lose Game 7 at home with a dreadful 4–0 loss to the Boston Bruins. This time, 100,000 people flooded the streets of Vancouver, flipping cars, setting things on fire, and looting stores around Rogers Arena. Nearly 100 people were arrested. Four people reportedly were stabbed. It was so bad, the Bruins’ postgame celebration in the visitors dressing room was interrupted by police, who told team officials they couldn’t guarantee the players’ safety. As they drove to the airport, mid-celebration, one team staffer said it looked like “a scene from Escape from New York.” It was one of the ugliest moments in NHL history, a black eye on the game.

  “It was bad,” Wiedeman says. “But if it was us that had beaten Vancouver in Game 7? It would have been three times worse.”

  “The Sedin Sisters”

  Maybe if Dave Bolland had remembered that he was live on the radio and not just talking to a smattering of fans in a bar, he wouldn’t have said it.

  Then again, it’s Dave Bolland. He probably would have, anyway.

  Bolland never quite fit the Blackhawks archetype in the John McDonough era. Oh, he had the game—a savvy, sneaky forward who had 57 goals and 73 assists with the OHL’s London Knights just one year before Patrick Kane posted 62 goals and 83 assists there. In the NHL, he carved out a niche as a shutdown defender, though with some offensive punch—he twice had 19-goal seasons in Chicago. But above all else, Bolland was a pest, an agitator who could coax ­opponents into chasing him around the rink and taking foolish ­penalties.

  But off the ice, he was always a little…different. He was a quirky, colorful character who seemed to have no filter with the press—at least, when he was available to the press. Perhaps no player in NHL history could get out of his gear, into the shower, into his clothes, and out the door faster than Bolland could. It became a running gag around his teammates and the team’s PR staff.

  But when Bolland did talk publicly, he didn’t just spout clichés and say the right things. He said whatever popped into his head. He said what he actually meant. It made him a rarity in the ­modern-day NHL, and it made him a fan favorite. It also got him into trouble every now and then. Never more so than when he referred to Vancouver’s Henrik and Daniel Sedin—the two people in the world he most loved to torment—as the “Sedin sisters.”

  As part of the team’s attempt to turn Chicago back into a hockey town, there were a series of events at downtown and suburban bars where players would come and do a Q&A with fans for an hour or two. Bolland had done a few of them, in Chicago, in Oak Park, in Glen Ellyn. While talking to reporters wasn’t always Bolland’s favorite thing, he loved doing the fan events, loved having a beer and “shooting the shit with everybody.” And seeing as how this was three years into their epic blood feud with the Vancouver Canucks, the Sedins frequently came up.

  Bolland had a lengthy history with the Sedins. In fact, in his first NHL shift, he lined up against the twins, along with Markus Naslund. For the rest of his career, thanks to those epic postseason battles with the Canucks, Bolland and the Sedins were inextricably linked. So wherever he went, the specter of the Sedins followed him. It almost became a schtick.

  During the December 14 event at Harry Caray’s, the twins came up again. Only this time, WGN Radio and host David Kaplan were broadcasting live across the Midwest. It started innocuously enough, with a young fan asking, “Do you hate everyone on the Canucks or just a lot of them?”

  “I hate all of them,” Bolland replied.

  “Good,” said the boy.

  Then he was asked about the Sedins.

  “I totally forgot it was on the radio and it was live,” Bolland said years later. “John McDonough was there, and a few other people from the team. Someone asked, ‘What do you think about the Sedin twins?’ And it just came out.”

  “It’s fun just jabbing at them,” Bolland said live to thousands of listeners. “You just keep yanking at them and doing little things to them, they’re going to snap. You see it happen with the Sedin sisters.”

  Another fan, another Sedin question.

  “If the Sedins ever became Blackhawks, will they still be sisters?”

  “They’ll never become Blackhawks,” Bolland said. “I don’t think we’d let them on our team. We’d be sure not to let them on our team. They probably still would be sisters. I think they might sleep in bunk beds. The older one has the bottom one and the other one’s got the top. In Vancouver, for sure, there’s a lot of weirdos there. You don’t want to be out there too long.”

  Naturally, the casually sexist and undeniably childish quote caused a firestorm. It came out of nowhere, too, seeing as how the teams weren’t even scheduled to play each other until January 31, some six weeks later.

  Few players have ever gotten under the skin of Vancouver’s Daniel and Henrik Sedin quite like the Blackhawks’ Dave Bolland. (USA Today Sports Images)

  The next day, Canucks coach Alain Vigneault called Bolland, “an individual whose IQ is probably the size of bird seed, and he’s got a face that only a mother could look at.”

  Henrik Sedin shrugged it all off: “Who cares? I’ve got a lot of respect for a lot of guys on that team. We don’t play them for another few weeks. I don’t know where that came from.”

  Bolland offered an apology the next day, calling it a “tongue in cheek” comment. Surprisingly, the order to issue a mea culpa didn’t come from McDonough, who spent years crafting and shaping the Blackhawks’ pristine image, but from Joel Quenneville, who surely made some ­c
olorful comments about opponents during his NHL career.

  “The only person who gave me grief for it was Q,” Bolland said. “He came up to me and said, ‘Shut this down. Now.’ I didn’t say ­anything back. I just went out and shut it down as best I could.”

  The Hot Seat

  It’s almost unfathomable now in hindsight, after such perennial dominance, after the second and third Stanley Cups, after the mustache became a Chicago icon alongside Michael Jordan’s tongue, Mike Ditka’s sweaters, and Ron Santo’s heels clicking together.

  But Joel Quenneville was this close to getting fired after—or even during—the 2011–12 season.

  As direct as Quenneville can be when communicating with—okay, screaming at—his players, his dealings with reporters are ­circuitous, meandering ramblings of partial sentences, stitched together into a purposefully opaque soundbite that often sounds like something, but says nothing. “Q-Speak” is a language unto itself, and if you’re around him long enough, you start to become fluent. For example, there’s a hierarchy to how he doles out praise and criticism for players after a game.

  “Special” is the highest praise there is, meaning utterly spectacular.

  “Good” means, well, good.

  “I didn’t mind him” is actually relatively high praise.

  “Fine” is not that fine.

  “Okay” is not very good.

  “Ordinary” is horrible, pathetic, terrible, he-wants-to-fire-you-into-the-sun bad.

  Ask Quenneville almost any question about a player, about a trend, about a nagging problem, and he’ll almost always come back with “Every game is different.” Good luck fishing for lineup information. Ask about a player’s injury, or a possible scratch, or a shakeup of the lines or pairings, and you’ll get a “We’ll see” nine times out of 10. “Could be” means almost certainly. Getting information out of Quenneville is like trying to draw blood from a grumbling, mustachioed stone.