Chicago Blackhawks Page 7

  They didn’t go out for a beer. They went out for beers.

  “It was the closest team I’ve ever been on. It was great,” Dave Bolland says. “Whenever we’d go out and have beers, the whole team would be out. Not just a few guys but the whole team. We were a really tight group. That’s one thing that you don’t see that much in the NHL. A lot of guys have wives and kids and it’s tough to get everybody out. But we were all young, and whenever we did something, we did it as a team. You didn’t have Instagram or Twitter. We had tons of fun. We’d always go out and have drinks. And that just made us closer. When we went into games, we knew we were so tight with each other that if anything happened on the ice, you’d go down for one guy. You’d be there to stick up for one another.”

  There was safety in numbers, too. With a bunch of reckless 21-year-olds running around, it helped having a phalanx of ­teammates in the bar at all times to make sure things stayed fun and goofy, not crazy and stupid.

  “Everybody looked out for each other,” Burish says. “If somebody was doing something stupid, or crossed the line where they might get in trouble, somebody would smack them and say, ‘Knock it off. Buff, stop it. You don’t need to grab that cop’s gun! I know he’s going to give it to you, but don’t run around the bar with it. I know it’s unloaded, but put the gun away, man!’ Everybody made sure things didn’t get out of hand.”

  Their drinking exploits—many of which centered around the Pony Inn, a bar in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, where much of the team lived—are legendary. And even the Blackhawks themselves were often surprised at how well they rebounded each morning on the ice.

  Ben Eager remembers one particular practice after a rough night out. He ran a drill, stickhandled, took a shot, scored, and nearly collapsed in the corner as his teammates laughed.

  “I don’t know how that just happened,” Eager gasped at the time. “Muscle memory just took over.”

  “As you get older, that muscle memory leaves you,” Eager says now. “My last two years, I didn’t have that. I couldn’t do that anymore. But back then, it felt like we could do anything.”

  And the Blackhawks, now one of the most buttoned-down, stoic operations in professional sports, didn’t discourage it. Joel Quenneville wasn’t exactly a teetotaler during his playing days, and as long as the players worked hard on the ice, he didn’t care if they played hard off the ice. During the annual “ice show trip” in 2009, when Disney On Ice took over the United Center, Quenneville brought the team to Las Vegas in between games in San Jose and Edmonton. It became an annual trip, but at the time, it was something of an experiment.

  The Blackhawks stayed at the Bellagio, watched the Super Bowl together in a special party room set up by the team, and then, in Burish’s words, “went crazy.” The next day, they trudged through one of the hardest practices of their lives, sweating pure alcohol on the ice before boarding a plane to Edmonton. It was a serious party and led to some serious discussions on the flight.

  “Guys, we’ve gotta win,” Burish told somebody, anybody, everybody. “We’ve gotta rattle off a couple wins here. I know we’re hurting, but let’s go. Because we want to do this again.”

  Sure enough, the Blackhawks beat the Oilers 3–1 and beat the Flames 5–2 before exhaustion finally caught up to them in a 7–3 loss in Vancouver.

  “Quenneville was the best thing to happen for us, because he recognized that we partied hard, we had fun, but we practiced and played really hard, too,” Burish says. “We practiced less than anybody, because he wanted us fresh for the games. So it was good for us, because we could do more stuff as a team and be close, have fun, get a couple days off, and go all out at the rink instead of doing it half-assed. He just let us run and let us do our thing. As long as we showed up for those 30 minutes of practice, ‘Hey, whatever you guys want to do, go do it.’”

  Much of that bond was formed in the minor leagues, in Norfolk and Rockford, where so many of the players—Troy Brouwer, Bolland, Burish, Colin Fraser, Versteeg, Dustin Byfuglien, and Niklas Hjalmarsson—came up together. A hockey dressing room can be a lot like a high school cafeteria, broken down into cliques with little interaction between them.

  Not that Blackhawks team.

  “You’re always going to have your friends on the team that you like more than others, that’s just natural,” Brouwer says. “And all hockey players are nice guys, but it’s basically a forced friendship. You’re put in a room with 30-35 guys, including trainers, and you have to interact with them every day. But the great thing about that team is we actually liked everybody. We’d get off the bus and it’d be like, ‘Everybody meet in the lobby at 6:15.’ Some guys would want to go out for steaks, some for Italian, whatever. And you didn’t go just with your specific friends, you’d go where the food you wanted was. Because you liked everybody. It was such an easy team to get along with. It’s kind of a cliché when you say you always remember the ­people on your championship team. But it’s true. You might not see them for four or five years, then you go and have dinner and a beer with them and you never stop talking. It was fun to be a part of.”

  Patrick Sharp has been on four championship teams, including a Calder Cup winner in the AHL, and even he says there’s never been a team like that 2010 squad.

  “That 2010 team was as close on and off the ice as I’ve been on,” Sharp says. “I think it was just a perfect storm of a lot of guys who had been in Chicago for a couple years together. Then you had a group of players who were in the minors together, who all graduated to the NHL together. And you had basically the same exact team for two to three years. All our girlfriends at the time were the same age and hung around together. On any given night, there weren’t any cliques. It was a group of people—it could be completely random. Whoever was hanging out that night, was hanging out. I think that’s a huge part in why we had the success we did.”

  At 33 years old, Brent Sopel was basically a grandpa on that squad. Playing with a bunch of wild and crazy kids was like ­finding the hockey fountain of youth. Sopel could hold his own with the young guys from time to time, but he had a family. Being on the road with those guys was like being a kid again.

  “When you’re on the circus trip and you’re stuck in San Jose for six fucking days, oh, my god,” Sopel says. “You’ve got to break up the monotony somehow.”

  Sopel’s adopted son, Paul, was 17 at the time, so Sopel’s teammates were closer in age to his son than to himself. He called himself a “babysitter, basically.”

  “I’ve never been a part of a team that got along on all levels through every single guy as much as that team,” Sopel says. “That team was special for so many reasons.”

  Not the least of which is that it was the last of its kind.

  There might never be another team like the 2010 Blackhawks, not in the age of social media, not when everyone has a camera on them at all times. And the way they see it, that’s too bad.

  Because as it turns out, being a professional athlete can be all sorts of fun.

  “When I got to San Jose, it was just a boring culture, a boring team,” Burish says. “I liked nothing about it. I remember guys ­saying, ‘Well, we don’t do team parties and we don’t do stuff in the ­playoffs, we don’t go for team dinners, blah blah blah, good teams don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Yeah? Well, this little Stanley Cup team I was on a couple years ago? After we swept you guys in four games? It was an afternoon game. We were done by 6:00. The entire team—the wives, girlfriends—we went to a bar until 4:00 in the morning. Everybody. Every single one of us. With the Stanley Cup Final coming up, everybody was there until at least 1:00 or 2:00, and half the team stayed till 4:00 in the morning. And you know what? We wound up doing okay.’”

  The Belt

  Anaheim Ducks defenseman James Wisniewski, angry over a high hit that Brent Seabrook delivered to Corey Perry in Anaheim on March 17, 2010, decided to do something about it
. So Wisniewski lined up Seabrook and hurled his body into the big Blackhawks ­defenseman, his forearm driving the back of Seabrook’s head into the glass at the Honda Center.

  Seabrook was out on his feet, arms limp at his sides as he slowly slid down the boards and collapsed in a heap on the ice behind the net. Seabrook stayed on the bench for a bit, but then went back to the dressing room and was diagnosed with a concussion that would keep him out of the next two games.

  Two nights after the hit, however, Seabrook was nursing a beer on the patio outside a bar in Glendale, Arizona, because, well, there’s nothing else to do in Glendale, Arizona. Seabrook was there with Colin Fraser (his roommate at the nearby Renaissance hotel) and a reporter.

  “I was already told I was a healthy scratch,” Fraser said. “So what do you do with nice weather when you know you’re not playing the next day? Absolutely, you find a patio and grab a beer.”

  The typically empty tavern was unusually crowded that night, thanks to the influx of baseball fans in town for spring training, with a DJ keeping everybody hopping. The DJ happened to be wearing a WWE championship belt. Fraser and Seabrook dug it and decided to try to buy it off him so they could give it out after the game against the Coyotes the following night.

  Seabrook tapped the DJ on the shoulder.

  “Hey, how much for the title belt?” he asked.

  “Sorry, it’s not for sale.”

  “I’ll give you $200.”

  “Not for sale.”

  “$300?”

  “Nope, not for sale.”

  “$400?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  It’s worth noting here that Seabrook was making $3.5 million that season.

  “Sold,” the DJ said.

  So Seabrook found an ATM, took out $400, and, in Fraser’s words, “the rest is history.”

  Seven years later, the Blackhawks were still giving out the belt—albeit a new, souped-up Blackhawks version—after every victory. And if not for James Wisniewski’s dangerous, illegal hit on Seabrook, it probably never would have existed.

  The Defining Moment

  A big part of the appeal of the 2010 Blackhawks, a big part of why they so bewitched a fan base both new and young, and old and embittered, was their youth. It was how loose they seemed on and off the ice. How much fun they seemed to be having. How cocky and carefree they seemed in the face of the unmatched pressure of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

  But Marian Hossa was not young. Nor was he that loose. And he sure as hell wasn’t carefree. Not after escaping Atlanta and getting all the way to the Stanley Cup Final with the Pittsburgh Penguins before losing to the Detroit Red Wings in 2008. Not after joining the Red Wings the following season, mercenary style, and getting all the way to the Stanley Cup Final again, only to lose by one goal in Game 7 to those same Penguins.

  The next off-season, he chose the up-and-coming Blackhawks as his next spot, hoping to end his nomadic life by signing a ludicrous 12-year contract that dropped to a measly $1 million salary by the end. It was a contract nobody expected him to finish; back then, before the 2013 lockout, you could sign deals like that.

  Being around the youthful Blackhawks rejuvenated Hossa, but at 31 years old, with all those 40-goal seasons in the rearview mirror, the big Slovak started to wonder if it was ever going to happen. Or worse, that he was a jinx.

  “I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel that pressure that year,” Hossa says. “When you’ve been on a couple different teams and you’re playing in the Final three times in a row, those voices are always in your head. ‘What if this doesn’t happen again? What if I never get back?’”

  Of course, Hossa went on to win a few Stanley Cups, and become a Chicago icon in his own right. But at the time, he was certainly in a different mindset than most of his teammates, who could afford to be flippant about a playoff run in their early twenties.

  “We weren’t thinking too far ahead,” Ben Eager says. “I was ­thinking if we didn’t win, we’d just have to get rid of Hossa. He was one of my favorite players growing up, but three years in a row? He’s a jinx! Get rid of him.”

  That pressure building up in Hossa’s mind came to a head during Game 5 of the Blackhawks’ first-round matchup with the Nashville Predators. With the series tied 2–2, the Blackhawks built up a 3–1 lead on goals by Andrew Ladd, Niklas Hjalmarsson, and Tomas Kopecky, with Hossa setting up his countryman on the latter. Then the bottom fell out.

  Joel Ward’s shorthanded goal late in the second period gave the Predators new life. Then Martin Erat scored early in the third to tie the game, then again with 8:21 left to give Nashville a 4–3 lead. The United Center, filled with so many fans—some Cup-starved and grizzled veterans, some new adoptees who had just been turned on to the sport—sounded like a morgue. Shortly before Erat had picked Denis Grebeshkov’s pass out of his skates and beaten Antti Niemi with a quick wrister to give Nashville the lead, Pekka Rinne had robbed Patrick Kane and Patrick Sharp on a power play. Frustration was mounting. Particularly on Hossa.

  And moments after coming up empty on a chance of his own, with time ticking down on the crucial and pivotal game, Hossa chased down Nashville’s Dan Hamhuis for a loose puck deep in the Predators’ zone. Hossa just wanted to go in hard on the forecheck and get the puck back. He wound up shoving Hamhuis in the side and sending him hard into the boards at full speed. The five-minute major for boarding was an easy call, met only with a dismissive wave by a fuming Joel Quenneville on the bench.

  Hossa trudged off to the penalty box, thinking, What have I done?

  “I tried to forecheck and do everything I could to get the puck back, but I hit the guy in a tough spot,” Hossa says. “I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ Usually I don’t take those types of penalties. And in a crucial game like this? You work so hard to try and create something, and then you do something like that. I couldn’t believe it.”

  With 63 seconds left, shorthanded, against one of the best ­trapping teams in the league, the game appeared over. And with it, possibly the series. And with that, possibly Hossa’s sanity.

  “You’re writing it off,” Troy Brouwer admits.

  But every championship has a turning point. An obstacle to overcome. An unlikely victory. In 2013, it was Brent Seabrook entering the penalty box and patting a full-tilt Jonathan Toews on the head and telling him it’d all be okay, before the Blackhawks rattled off three straight wins to erase a 3–1 series deficit against Detroit. In 2015, it was Toews breaking Ducks goaltender Frederik Andersen’s brain with two late goals to force overtime in Game 5—a game that was a loss in the short term but a huge win in the long run.

  In 2010? It came with their best penalty killer, Hossa, in the box. And with Patrick Kane, who had played 10 measly minutes of shorthanded time all season, on the ice. Lingering. Looming. Lurking.

  “I don’t know if he played a single minute on the PK all year long, and he’s just hanging out by the red line, waiting for a breakaway pass,” Brouwer says with a laugh.

  It never came. But when the Blackhawks managed to enter the zone, Kane did what he does best, which is find open ice. With the play all to one side, Kane slid toward Rinne’s blind side, stick on the ice, praying for the puck to come his way. Seabrook fed Toews for a quick shot, and the rebound came toward Kane and Ward on the right side of the crease. Kane got there first, sweeping in a backhander with 13.6 seconds left.

  Kane wheeled around and raced down the ice in celebration, ­firing off windmill fist pumps as Patrick Sharp hugged him. The crowd at the United Center spontaneously burst to life, the sounds of The Fratellis’ “Chelsea Dagger” reverberating throughout the ­cavernous arena. And all by his lonesome in the penalty box, Marian Hossa looked like the littlest kid on the team, jumping up and down like a madman as a mix of relief and joy washed over him.

  “It was a weird place to be
, celebrating in the penalty box,” Hossa says. “But it was exciting.”

  The next day, some of Hossa’s teammates got their hands on a video clip of his solo celebration. They couldn’t stop watching it.

  “He’s jumping up and down and banging on the glass, all by ­himself,” Brouwer says. “It was absolutely hilarious.”

  The overtime intermission—the Blackhawks walked down the tunnel to a standing ovation as Gene Honda announced Kane’s goal over the public-address system—was the first time the modern-day, unflappable, unkillable Blackhawks mentality really showed itself. There wasn’t any premature celebration. There wasn’t a whole lot of backslapping and fist-bumping. Oh, there was the usual Seabrook chatter—the “Here we go, Red!” and the “Come on now, boys!” that tend to spill out of him before games and in big moments. Toews might have had a few words. But in what would become the Blackhawks’ hallmark, it was a pretty mellow place. Party away from the rink, all business at the rink.

  “It’s all about riding those highs and lows and trying to stay even-keel,” says Brent Sopel, one of the more veteran players on the team. “We just sat there and talked about our strategy. We still had four minutes of penalty-kill ahead of us to start overtime. Our PK had been phenomenal—I was enjoying taking Shea Weber shots off every part of my body. We were comfortable and confident that we could get through that penalty kill, then we’d just go from there. Never at any point did we get too high, and never at any point did we get too low. It was a real asset of that team.”

  During those 18 tense minutes, Toews’ thoughts turned to what might be going on in the other dressing room, just a few feet down the hall.

  “When the other team ties it up like that, your heart sinks and you feel like you really let a huge opportunity slip,” Toews says. “You’re just trying to move on. But it’s a completely different feeling when you’re the one who ties it up. You get that second chance and you have that feeling of destiny. You just know you’re going to pull it off. So you just keep that positive chatter going and keep everyone in that right frame of mind. Someone’s going to be the hero. Make that play and make it you.”