Chicago Blackhawks Page 15

  “You don’t want to have any regrets,” he told his younger teammates. “I’ve been on bad teams before, and at the end of the day, you only get so many chances to win. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the beginning of your career, the middle of your career, or the end of your career. You don’t want to look back and have regrets. If you’re on a bad team, life isn’t fun. When you’re not winning, coming to the rink is miserable.

  “At the end of the day, the owner’s going to say to the GM, ‘What happened? This was the group that was supposed to win ­multiple Cups.’ And then the GM’s going to say, ‘I got the players that we could afford under the cap.’ And then the coach is going to say, ‘I coached the players you gave me.’ And you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to change the formula.”

  Mayers went around the room and looked at his teammates—young guys chasing their first Cup like Brandon Saad and Andrew Shaw, guys in their prime chasing a legacy like Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, guys in the twilight of their careers chasing a dying dream like Michal Handzus and Michal Rozsival—square in the eyes.

  “You think they’re going to keep this team together if we don’t win?” Mayers asked. “No. They’re going to change it.” He started poking his finger in everyone’s faces. “And you’re going to be in Nashville. And you’re going to be in Minnesota. And you’re going to be in Columbus. And they’ll wipe their hands of it. The people that are going to lose are you guys, because you’re going to be somewhere else. We can do it. It’s one game at a time, but we can do it. We have an unbelievable chance to win, and we shouldn’t let that go to waste.”

  Mayers’ message landed, and hard. But he wasn’t done yet. He knew he wasn’t playing; he wouldn’t play a single game that postseason. But the crafty veteran had one last trick up his sleeve.

  Healthy scratches are entitled to take warmups if they choose, and Mayers always chose to. Before Game 5, as a tense United Center crowd filed in and his tense teammates tried to loosen up for the must-win contest, Mayers started firing pucks at Red Wings goaltender Jimmy Howard—surreptitiously at first, then a little more brazenly as the warmups went on. During Detroit’s 2-on-1 rushes. During Detroit’s line rushes. During their casual shootaround.

  “My thought was, let’s just try to get into their head a little bit,” Mayers says. “Let’s challenge them. Really, I was just trying to piss them off. And they didn’t do anything about it.”

  It was a tremendous breach of hockey etiquette. And when the Blackhawks got back to the dressing room afterward, it was all anybody could talk about—not the unbelievably daunting task that lay ahead.

  “Nobody was talking that we were down 3–1,” Mayers recalls. “The guys were all saying, ‘What the heck were you doing the whole time?’ It created a bit of a distraction, maybe.”

  The Blackhawks went on to a confidence-boosting 4–1 victory, with Toews scoring a power-play goal to get off the schneid and soothe his frustration, and Shaw—one of those players Mayers pointed to during his pregame plea—scoring two goals. The Blackhawks outshot the Wings 45–26 in a desperately needed dominant effort.

  Mayers was fined $1,500 by the league for his warmup antics, and it was the best $1,500 he ever spent. The next game, two of his old teammates, Ian White and Carlo Colaiacovo, came up to him during warmups.

  “What were you doing?” one of them asked.

  “I shot at least 15 pucks at your net during your warmup, and not one of you said anything to me,” Mayers replied. “If I had done that 10 years earlier against Detroit, I would have gotten jumped by Darren McCarty, and Brendan Shanahan would have grabbed me, and it would have been a donnybrook. You guys didn’t do a thing.”

  On paper, Mayers didn’t do a thing throughout that postseason run. But like Adam Burish in 2010, Mayers proved that you don’t have to be on the ice to play a big role in a championship run.

  “Mike Keane, who won three Cups with three different teams, once told me it doesn’t matter where you fit on the hierarchy of the team, whether you’re a fourth-liner or the best player,” Mayers says. “If you care about the team first, then anything you say is to help the team. And if you don’t say it, you’re actually hurting the team. To me it was great advice. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you care about the team first and you see something that can help the group, you have to say it. And for me, I didn’t want to have regrets. I didn’t want to have regrets that I didn’t say something in that moment. Did I put myself out there and make myself vulnerable? Yes. But I didn’t want a Brandon Saad, who’s a rookie, to never get back, to never get that chance again, and be 38 years old and look back and say, ‘You know, my big chance was when I was 21.’ That’s all I was saying. They did it. I wasn’t playing. They did it. I just tried to help.”

  Detroit: Game 6

  Every fan wants to read about his or her team winning, not ­losing. A game story after a run-of-the-mill victory will get two, three, even four times as many clicks as one after a loss. Nobody likes reliving ­misery, as each turn of phrase of the story is a turn of the knife in the fan.

  But here’s the funny thing about sportswriting: it’s so much better to write about devastation than jubilation. Victory is formulaic, a repetitive distillation of childhood dreams realized, of proud parents and joyful tears and hugs and yadda yadda yadda. It’s been written a hundred times, and readers have all read it a hundred times. It might not get old for a fan, but it gets old for a writer.

  Now, devastation? Devastation is poetic. Lyrical. Beautiful and singular. A giddy player in victory is a cliché machine. A gutted player in defeat is a man laid bare, his soul pouring from his lips in quiet tones as he stares blankly into space, another year of blood and sweat ending in tears. The wrong kind of tears.

  That story was being pre-written by countless writers during the second intermission of Game 6 against Detroit in 2013. The Blackhawks, after that deliriously giddy romp through the regular season, were on the verge of an unthinkable second-round defeat. A third straight early exit. A choke job. And jobs were hanging in the balance.

  Writers weren’t the only ones who were starting to write the Blackhawks off, though they were the only ones doing it literally. Even in the Blackhawks dressing room, Corey Crawford started to wonder if it was all crashing down around him. Not just the series and the season, but his career. This was May of 2013, and hard as it can be to believe, now that Crawford is one of the game’s elite goalies—an unflappable, unflinching, unyielding rock between the pipes—the knock on him at the time was that he was mentally weak. Two soft overtime goals a year earlier in a five-game loss to the Arizona Coyotes created an army of doubters who found Crawford mediocre at best, a loser at worst.

  And as he sat in his locker stall during the second intermission of Game 6 in Detroit, the terrible second-period goal he allowed to Joakim Andersson—a soft, unscreened knuckler from just inside the blue line—replayed in his mind on a loop.

  Jonathan Toews later said the room was full of “pure confidence,” but Crawford remembered it being a lot more tense than that.

  “I think a lot of guys maybe felt some pressure; I certainly did,” Crawford says. “I felt like I could have maybe given some better performances, especially the year before.”

  Andrew Shaw felt it, too. After all, while there were eight Stanley Cup champions in that room, Shaw wasn’t one of them. He was a 21-year-old kid. And he was terrified.

  “It’s scary, I’ll tell you that,” Shaw says. “It’s scary to see how much success we had that year and to think that it could be over in 20 minutes. I think a lot of guys learned from that game, from that whole series. We took it with us and we hold on to it. It just shows the character we had in the room and what we were able to overcome and achieve as a group.”

  Indeed, a low point became a turning point in Crawford’s career. After the Andersson goal, Crawford didn’t crumble, he hardene
d. He saw 22 shots the rest of the way. Stopped every single one of them. And the Blackhawks returned the favor.

  “He’s been so strong for us the whole playoffs,” Marian Hossa said after the game. “We came back for him. That shows the great team game we have.”

  It started with Michal Handzus’ goal less than a minute into the third period, a brilliant bit of patience and puckhandling, waiting out Jimmy Howard on the doorstep before flipping the puck past him. Five minutes later, Bryan Bickell gave the Blackhawks a 3–2 lead. Four minutes after that, Michael Frolik broke free for a breakaway, only to get a whack on the hand from Detroit’s Carlo Colaiacovo, earning a penalty shot in the process.

  Nobody on the Blackhawks bench talked to Frolik before the shot. Just as well, too, because he wouldn’t have been able to hear them over the sound of his own wheezing after a frantic 45-second shift.

  “It was a longer shift, so I just tried to catch my breath and calm myself down a little bit,” Frolik says.

  In the biggest moment of his career, in front of a hostile crowd, with a chance to force a Game 7 on the line, Frolik figured it was a good time to try something he had never tried before. At least, not in a game. Once or twice, during the Blackhawks’ occasional post-­practice shootout competitions, Frolik had tried faking forehand before turning his stick over and offering up a slick but risky roof job of a backhand.

  More than three years later, Frolik still remembers the simplistic thought process behind it.

  “I figured, let’s try this move,” Frolik says with a shrug.

  It worked beautifully, fooling Howard, who was looking for something low. Frolik raised his stick above his head with his left arm and suddenly realized he had nobody to celebrate with. In the ultimate team game, penalty shots leave a player on an island. So he turned back and flew down the boards, raising his arms in triumph just as he started passing the Detroit bench. Past a scowling Mike Babcock. Past a spitting Pavel Datsyuk. Past a line of dejected Red Wings faces.

  It was a moment made for the animated-GIF age, the always affable, perpetually happy Frolik, celebrating on repeat for all eternity.

  “It’s kind of strange when you score and you’re alone on the ice and you don’t have anybody to celebrate with,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about celebrating in front of their bench. I was just trying to get to our bench as fast as possible and just jump on all the guys. The guys were so happy, and they all said, ‘Good job’ and things like that. It was a very exciting moment.”

  And it was just the start.

  Detroit: Game 7

  For all the sweat and blood soaked into the carpet, all the ­wadded-up balls of tape strewn about the trash can, all the ­gruesome odors permanently caked into the walls, there’s a fastidiousness to an NHL dressing room. Equipment is hung just so, used jerseys placed delicately on a laundry hamper, skates symmetrically ­balanced on hooks, name plates perfectly centered above each stall. The only ­people in sports more obsessive-compulsive than players are the equipment staff, who work feverishly behind the scenes to ensure every player’s individual peccadilloes are satisfied.

  But for a little more than two years, near the back left corner of the Blackhawks dressing room, there was a gash in the stately wooden stall—about a half-inch deep, and about as wide as the blade of Niklas Hjalmarsson’s stick. Until the room was renovated in the summer of 2015, the notch stood as a battle scar, a permanent reminder of one of the wildest mood swings in Blackhawks history.

  A few minutes before Hjalmarsson left his mark in the room, he thought he had left his mark on the ice—a career-defining moment that would enshrine him in the annals of hockey history. Everyone dreams of scoring a playoff-series-winning goal, even stay-at-home Swedish defensemen who earn their living blocking shots, not taking them. And when Hjalmarsson blasted a slapper past Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard from just inside the left circle with 1:47 to go in a tied Game 7, he disappeared into his teammates’ embrace and into Blackhawks lore.

  Or so he thought.

  The six guys on the ice and the 14 on the bench were screaming as loudly as the 22,000-plus in the stands, as “Chelsea Dagger” blared and the whole city was dancing. But then a chilling realization set in on Hjalmarsson and everyone else not wearing a winged wheel on his chest—the goal was waved off. A meaningless scrap between Brandon Saad and Kyle Quincey far behind the play prompted referee Stephen Walkom to blow his whistle to hand out matching roughing minors, and the biggest goal of Hjalmarsson’s career was erased from existence.

  A hundred and seven seconds of game action later, Hjalmarsson was still blind with rage, stomping into the Blackhawks dressing room, stick in hand, and unleashing his frustration with a two-handed tomahawk chop on the seat of his locker stall.

  “A lot of commotion,” Joel Quenneville said later with a chuckle, though he was spitting nails at the time.

  Hjalmarsson barely even remembers the stick swing now. But the feeling is still palpable. He’s still furious about it to this day.

  “I was angry and disappointed,” he says. “I thought we won the series. But the series was still on the line, the whole season was on the line. I was pissed for a couple of minutes, but then I started refocusing.”

  Everyone did. They had no choice. After the stick swing, it was quiet in the room for a moment as the players tried to wrap their brains around being robbed of a victory. Not just a victory, a Game 7 victory. Not just a Game 7 victory, a Game 7 victory after being down 3–1 in the series and left for dead. History. Glory. Gone.

  For now.

  Disbelief quickly gave way to defiance. Nobody remembers exactly what was said, but most Blackhawks recall it was Brent Seabrook—who else?—who first broke the silence, with a generic, “Hey! Let’s go, Red!” platitude. One by one, other players piped in. Everything was short but fiery. The words didn’t matter as much as the force behind them. Finally, Jonathan Toews stood up and said, “We’ll just fucking beat them 3–1.”

  Anger now yielded to opportunity. Hjalmarsson’s chance to be a hero was taken away. But that meant everyone else still had a chance to live out a childhood dream of their own.

  “You kind of get that butterfly feeling in your stomach that I think everyone gets in here, thinking that you might be the guy to go score the goal,” Toews said after the game. “If you get that one chance, that’s all you need—one puck to land on your stick in the right place.”

  More than a few times in his career, that right place has been Seabrook’s stick in the high slot in overtime. And 3:35 into overtime, Seabrook stepped into the biggest shot of his life, sending the puck past Howard, sending the United Center into hysteria, sending his teammates into a frenzy along the glass, sending Stephen Walkom into obscurity rather than infamy, and sending the Blackhawks franchise into its true golden age.

  Seabrook’s head was still ringing by the time he got back into the dressing room, his teammates having pounded on it like a bongo during the postgame dogpile.

  “It’s exciting,” he said in the giddy moments that followed the franchise’s great escape from that 3–1 series deficit. “You don’t get to do that too many times.”

  That stick hangs on the wall of Seabrook’s basement to this day—like the notch in Hjalmarsson’s locker stall, a reminder of the culmination of what might have been the most pivotal series in Blackhawks history. Had the Blackhawks squandered that delirious 21–0–3 start and lost in the second round to a middling team—their most bitter rivals, no less—to suffer their third straight early exit, someone was getting fired. Maybe it would have been Joel Quenneville, today the second-winningest coach in NHL history. Maybe it would have been Stan Bowman, today the mad cap-ologist keeping the Blackhawks in contention every year against all odds and basic mathematics. Maybe it would have been much of the team, the core dismantled and retooled with only Toews and Kane left to build around.

  But what co
uld have been their most disastrous failure turned into their greatest triumph, a comeback that was the genesis point of the Blackhawks’ unwavering confidence, a self-belief that borders on arrogance. If the Blackhawks could walk into that dressing room in a rage, and walk back out of it calm, focused, and even genuinely excited, then what couldn’t they do?

  “It was a pretty cool moment in our season, in the playoffs, in my life,” Seabrook says. “We’ve been in a lot of big series and a lot of big games. We’ve been up, we’ve been down. All those experiences, you take them into new playoffs, new series, new seasons. It’s something you can look back on and lean on and know that, no matter what, we always have a chance.”

  “Footsteps”

  Funny thing about going through a salary-cap purge nearly every summer: you run into ex-teammates. A lot. And in the 2013 Western Conference final, Colin Fraser, now with the Los Angeles Kings, relished the chance to go up against so many of his old teammates.

  Fraser always was a chirpy guy, always trying to get under the skin of his opponents. And for Game 1 of the series, he turned his attention to a player he always loved to torment in his days in Chicago—Patrick Sharp.

  It didn’t go exactly as he planned.

  Early on, Fraser was all over Sharp, in his ear during play, before faceoffs, even from the bench. Finally, in the middle of the second period, he took a run at Sharp, but just missed.

  “You’re scared!” Fraser mocked. “Footsteps, Sharpie, footsteps!”

  On his next shift, Sharp scored. With Fraser on the ice, to boot. On his way back to the bench, Sharp had a quick word for Fraser.

  “Footsteps, Fraz!” he said. “Footsteps!”

  Crisis of Confidence

  Patrick Kane sat slumped forward in his locker stall at Staples Center, his eyes cast down at the floor, not at the dozen or so reporters and camera people crowding around him, their arms wedged into any opening they could find in order to get their recorders and microphones close enough to Kane’s mouth to hear his frustrated mutterings.