Chicago Blackhawks Page 9

  “But it’s Q, so it was short and sweet,” Burish said. “His ­formal video on the Flyers was probably shorter than my jerk-off video ­making fun of everybody. That’s a perfect example of why Quenneville was so perfect for that team. He understood us. He understood me. He knew that I was a goofball who liked to have fun, and he just let me run with it.”

  Years later, nobody remembers Quenneville’s video. But everyone remembers Burish’s.

  “Oh, fuck, I’ll never forget Burish’s pre-scouts,” Sopel said. “How could you?”

  Marian Hossa and Burish were on opposite ends of the roster that year. Hossa was the missing piece, the superstar, the legend in the making on an epic three-year quest to win the Stanley Cup. Burish was an extra guy, a role player, a healthy scratch. But when Hossa looks back on that 2010 Cup run, it’s Burish’s silly songs, and poems, and videos, and dumb jokes, and goofy faces ­during tense moments that were as important as any other contribution that spring.

  “The atmosphere is so tense, so tight coming into the games, and even on the days in between,” Hossa says. “It’s so tight because you’re so close, right? There’s all that tension. And those ­little things ­definitely helped, I believe. It loosens you up, it’s more fun. Everybody’s happier and having fun instead of just focusing ­non-stop, 24 hours, on the next game. That’s really important, and guys like Bur, they did an excellent job. They made a real difference for me, and for everybody.”

  Though his opportunities to contribute on the ice were sometimes limited, Adam Burish (center) was an integral part of the 2010 Blackhawks’ incredible chemistry. He celebrated their Stanley Cup victory with teammates Kris Versteeg (left) and Dave Bolland (right).

  Seven years later, at the Winter Classic in St. Louis, Hossa pulled Burish aside and thanked him yet again for helping him get through the most pressure-packed two months of his life.

  “All the superstars on that team, they always made the rest of us feel appreciated,” Burish said. “We always felt like whether it was me or [Ben Eager] or Sopel, your bottom-six forwards, or your bottom three or four [defensemen], those superstar guys always made us feel important, too. They made us feel valuable and they made us understand that what we brought was important. I’ve been on teams where the bottom six, they’re just forgotten. In San Jose, we were embarrassed all the time. The bottom six, we were always highlighted in red every morning because we didn’t have more than five shots on net. Well, fuck, we played 10 minutes, no kidding. We take all the D-zone faceoffs, we kill penalties, we shut down the team’s top lines some games. We’re not out there to score. Some teams you get embarrassed on those bottom lines, because they don’t want to yell at the stars, so they just yell at us. In Chicago, we all appreciated each other. We helped each other. And they made us feel just as ­important. I think that’s why it all worked so well. There wasn’t a pecking order. Everybody had their job. Everybody mattered.”

  John Wiedeman’s Day Off

  They should have landed the plane. That would have been the safe thing to do. The smart thing to do. The only thing to do, really. But this is hockey. And hockey people don’t always do the safe thing, the smart thing. They do the tough thing. Right or wrong.

  About 30 minutes into a four-and-a-half-hour flight from Chicago to Vancouver, en route to Game 6 of the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Blackhawks radio man John Wiedeman was doubled over in his seat. Out of nowhere, he got a stabbing pain in his lower abdomen, and it wasn’t going away. He tried to sit back up but couldn’t, and stayed hunched over. He asked a flight attendant for some apple juice, but that didn’t do the trick. He tried leaning on a pillow, but that didn’t help much, either. It was as much pain as he had ever experienced, and it wasn’t going away.

  Wiedeman’s mind was racing. What if it’s appendicitis? What if his appendix bursts at 35,000 feet? He thought about his wife, Kelly. He thought about his young children. But being a hockey guy, he also thought about the guys in the back of the plane playing cards, listening to music, or taking naps. The ones who have been killing themselves on the ice all season just to get to this point, on the verge of advancing to the Western Conference final for the ­second straight season.

  And so Wiedeman decided to sit there and endure the pain. Because hockey.

  “I’m thinking to myself, I’m on a plane with a bunch of hockey ­players going through a playoffs, and God knows what they’re dealing with,” Wiedeman recalls. “Broken bones, maybe? They’re not divulging that. Not until they’re done. God only knows what they’re dealing with. So the last thing I’m going to do is tell the pilot to land this plane because I’ve got a stomachache.”

  Four hours later, the plane landed in Vancouver. After an excruciating stop-and-go ride to downtown Vancouver with a brake-happy bus driver—there’s no highway that connects the airport with ­downtown, it’s stoplights nearly the entire way—communications director Brandon Faber brought team doctor Michael Terry aboard the bus to look at Wiedeman. Terry didn’t have any answers.

  “What do you want to do, Johnny?”

  “Let’s get to the hospital,” Wiedeman replied.

  Wiedeman wasn’t exactly rushed into the emergency room. It doesn’t work that way in Canada. There was paperwork to be filled out, 10 minutes’ or so worth, as Wiedeman hunched over and filled out some forms in agony. Finally, he was brought in, set up with an IV, and given some morphine. And for the first time in more than five hours, the pain dissipated in a glorious, drug-induced euphoria. He drifted off.

  Doctors ran a bunch of tests, and it turned out to be a severe attack of diverticulitis. Faber came in and told Wiedeman that he had spoken with his wife, and that the team was going to fly in pre- and postgame host Judd Sirott to fill in for Wiedeman for Game 6. Wiedeman, who had never missed a game as an NHL broadcaster, was having none of it.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “This is over. I can do the game.”

  But the hospital said he couldn’t leave for at least two days. And so Wiedeman missed the clinching game, a tense, scoreless first period yielding quickly to a 5–1 Blackhawks victory. He caught some of it on TV, but was in and out of tests and didn’t get to hear Sirott’s call. Wiedeman joined the team in San Jose a couple of days later, and gutted out the conference final while on an all-liquid diet, his body weak but his voice still strong.

  To this day, he still hasn’t missed any other games. And it still eats at him that he missed one, in 17 seasons in the NHL with the Philadelphia Flyers, the New York Islanders, and the Blackhawks.

  “I tell you, it sucked,” he says. “I don’t like to miss work. I just don’t. And I would have worked that one if the doctor had let me.”

  Hockey people. They’re…different.

  “A Long Way from the Heart”

  Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt that much. Duncan Keith, during a Blackhawks power play, had just taken a Patrick Marleau clearing attempt right in the face—the frozen slab of rubber hitting him square in the teeth—and he knew it wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to him, and the weird way the air came into his mouth when he took a breath told him that he’d probably lost a tooth or two, but he wasn’t exactly panicking. He didn’t even go down. He covered his face with his hands and ambled over to the bench.

  He saw fellow defenseman Brian Campbell first.

  “Is it bad?” Keith asked.

  Campbell didn’t answer.

  “He just gave me a horrified look,” Keith says now.

  Two teeth were gone completely. Another one was somewhere in the back of his throat. Four others were clinging to his gums in various stages of disintegration. It was gruesome, like something out of one of those slasher flicks that Keith loves so much. But this was Game 4 of the Western Conference final, and the Blackhawks were on the verge of clinching their first trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 18 years. On home ice, no less.

 
So Keith did what any hockey player would do. He went back to the dressing-room area, had some of the remaining tooth fragments ripped out of his mouth, took a shot of novocaine to numb up his mangled maw, and went back out on the ice to go win a hockey game.

  When he left the ice, there was 12:31 left in the second period. When he returned, there was 5:58. Missed two shifts, maybe three. Hockey, man.

  His second shift back lasted a minute, 53 seconds. He played more than 17 of the final 26 minutes.

  There were no stitches, but there were still small pieces of teeth embedded in his ravaged gums as he racked up monumental ­minutes in a monumental game. Patrick Sharp says Keith—already a bit of a mumbler with a full grill—was issuing orders during a couple of third-period power plays, but nobody could understand what he was saying.

  “It was pretty messy,” Keith says.

  After the game, before heading to the hospital, Keith stuck around for the handshake line and did a TV interview, joking that he could get some better-looking teeth now because “my teeth weren’t that good to start with.”

  “It’s just missing teeth,” Keith said. “It’s a long way from the heart.”

  From the United Center, he went right to the hospital with the team dentist, who spent a couple of hours working on him. He has spent many an hour in dentist chairs since, cleaning up the mess and installing what are known as “breakaway teeth,” which are more easily replaced the next time a puck or a stick or a fist inevitably finds its way into Keith’s face. Keith likes them a heck of a lot better than his old “flipper” teeth, the partial dentures that have been a part of hockey for ages.

  Keith’s craggy smile—four missing on the bottom, three on the top—became one of the indelible images of the Blackhawks’ 2010 Stanley Cup run. Like Andrew Shaw’s bloody cheek in 2013, it’s iconic, a part of hockey lore. Keith, in typical Keith fashion, shrugs it off. Just part of the game.

  “A lot of guys went through different things that playoff run,” he says with a shrug. “That was just one that kind of stuck out in people’s minds. I lost a lot of teeth, but everybody on that team sacrificed something, everybody gave something different. I mean, they’re only teeth.”

  The Pronger Factor

  Ever since the miraculous Game 5 victory over Nashville, it was all coming so easily for the Blackhawks. Almost too ­easily. A six-game victory over the hated Vancouver Canucks, with the Blackhawks shaking off a 5–1 loss in Game 1 and returning the favor with an emphatic 5–1 victory in Game 6. In Vancouver, no less. Then came a sweep of the San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference final—a result that surprised even the cocky Blackhawks themselves.

  “It was shocking,” Ben Eager says. “That was a good team. I don’t know if they could have possibly swept us, but that could have easily been a six-game series. After we swept them, we were sitting back for a few days waiting for the Final to start, and I was thinking we had a pretty good chance.”

  The Philadelphia Flyers didn’t waste any time either, winning the Eastern Conference final in five games over the eighth-seeded Montreal Canadiens. The Flyers had goaltending issues, but they also had big, bad Chris Pronger on the blue line—a 6-foot-6 mountain of mean coming off one of the best seasons of his standout career, with 10 goals and 45 assists.

  It was a Stanley Cup Final loaded with star power and high-octane offensive talent. Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Sharp, and Marian Hossa against Jeff Carter, Claude Giroux, Mike Richards, and Danny Briere. But the most intriguing matchup was between a couple of chirpy Blackhawks and Pronger. Eager and Dustin Byfuglien took it upon themselves to make Pronger’s life a living hell, and Pronger had no qualms about returning the favor.

  “I know personally from playing against him that he’s got that arrogant edge to him,” Eager says. “But I’d be in his ear every time. I was trying to throw him off his game. He was one of their better players, so I was doing my job just being irritating. I was constantly talking to him. He acts like he doesn’t deal with so-called fourth-line players, but I guarantee we threw him off his game. When you’ve got a 40-year-old guy picking up pucks like a child, you know you have him.”

  Ah, the pucks. One of the dumber, yet most memorable, controversies in recent playoff history.

  The Blackhawks took the first two games at the United Center, a 6–5 roller coaster in Game 1 and a 2–1 thriller in Game 2. Pronger snatched the puck off the ice after each win, keeping the Blackhawks from saving any souvenirs. Legend has it he threw the pucks in the trash, too.

  Eager, of all people, had the game-winner late in the second period of Game 2, his only goal of the playoff run. But once the game ended, Pronger grabbed the game puck, which provoked a brief scrap during the Blackhawks’ celebration. Pronger was the last Flyers player to leave the ice, and he and Eager picked up meaningless 10-minute misconduct penalties on their way out.

  “He was picking up the puck, I told him he could keep it,” Eager said after the game.

  Asked what Eager had said, Pronger quipped, “I don’t speak whatever language Eager was speaking. Apparently, it got him upset. So I guess it worked, didn’t it? It’s too bad. I guess little things amuse little minds.”

  Pronger might have won the war of words off the ice, but the fact that the future Hall of Famer was even engaging in such silly mind games with a guy who played a mere four minutes and three seconds in Game 2 meant it was a win for Eager and the Blackhawks.

  “When you’re playing games like that with Chris Pronger, you’re sitting pretty,” Eager says. “We definitely got to him.”

  Pronger was the focal point of everything in that series. The Chicago Tribune even ran a childish Photoshopped poster of Pronger in a hockey jersey and a figure-skating dress, calling him “Chrissy Pronger,” with the tagline, “Looks like Tarzan, skates like Jane.” It was justifiably met with scorn for its blatant misogyny, but it underscored just how quickly and how vehemently Blackhawks fans came to hate Pronger.

  And Eager didn’t let up. Neither did Byfuglien. Nor Kris Versteeg. Nor Adam Burish. Nor Dave Bolland. Nor half the snarky Blackhawks roster. Even relatively mild-mannered Tomas Kopecky got in on the fun. Every time Pronger skated past the Blackhawks bench, he’d get an earful. Before every faceoff, an ­earful. After every hit, an earful. Pronger rarely chirped back, maintaining an air of superiority over the scruffy kids who were taking runs at him.

  “He would act like, ‘I’m too good to talk back to anyone,’ but you know he’s hearing it,” Eager says. “He’s reading it, too. We would hit him and talk to him every shift, every time he passed the bench. In one game, you say a few words, whatever. But for a six-game series, if you constantly stay on someone super-obnoxiously, it definitely gets to you. We had done it in past series, too—we were just a bunch of little rats. Skating by our bench wasn’t that much fun, I can imagine. Because when you’re young, you don’t have too much of a conscience, so everything’s fair game. Looking back, there are probably a few guys that if I saw them, I’d probably apologize to them for some of the things I said back in the day.”

  On the one hand, the Blackhawks were playing into Pronger’s hands by running around looking for hits instead of playing within Joel Quenneville’s structured system. On the other hand, Pronger was a minus-5 in Game 5 after the Flyers had rallied to tie the series 2–2.

  “We got to him,” Bolland says. “He’s a great player, but we got to him.”

  The whole series pivoted on that Game 5. And it began on the plane back to Chicago, where the two winningest coaches in NHL history put their heads together and came up with a plan. With the Flyers storming back to tie the series with a pair of wins in Philadelphia, there was a sense that the Blackhawks were ­losing control of the series. And Pronger was leading the charge, though the Blackhawks were loath to acknowledge his growing intimidation factor.

  “He’s a good player, he’s one of the best of al
l time you can say,” Patrick Sharp said after Game 4. “He’s managed to do it in the old rules before the lockout, and he’s been able to change his game a bit and still be a dominant defenseman. As far as intimidating, I don’t know if he’s intimidating anyone. He’s just a good player out there.”

  So in an extraordinary meeting of the minds, head coach Joel Quenneville and senior advisor Scotty Bowman, sitting together in the front row of the charter plane, toward the window, got a legal pad out and started jotting down different line combinations. Quenneville had dabbled with some line changes at the end of Game 4, ­breaking up his top line of Toews, Kane, and Byfuglien to try to get the ­momentum back. Quenneville put Kane with Kris Versteeg and Bolland. He put Toews with Byfuglien and Ladd. It helped, but Bowman ­suggested more drastic changes—Kane with Ladd and Sharp, Toews with Marian Hossa and Kopecky, and Byfuglien with Bolland and Versteeg.

  And surprise, surprise, Scotty Bowman knew what he was ­talking about.

  The changes woke Byfuglien, the sleeping giant. Through the first four games, the defenseman-forward hybrid had one assist and was a minus-4. He was making hits and getting in Pronger’s ear, but he wasn’t having much of an impact on the game. That all changed in Game 5. Byfuglien was a man possessed, scoring two goals, ­setting up two more, and delivering nine hits, none bigger than the ­crushing—and oh, so satisfying—blow he landed on Pronger right after a faceoff early in the second period, with the Blackhawks up 4–2. Four ­hundred and eighty pounds of man collided in the corner as Pronger went for the puck and Byfuglien went for the kill. With one mighty ­shoulder block, Byfuglien sent Pronger careening sideways into the boards. Pronger bounced right back up and stayed in the play, but that was the play that jump-started Byfuglien.

  “That was the game when I knew we were going to win the Cup,” Blackhawks radio play-by-play man John Wiedeman says. “Buff put Pronger into the boards and just destroyed their intimidation. I still go on YouTube just to watch that hit.”