Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  McDonough indeed saw a huge opportunity. He also saw a huge task. His first job was to clean house, which, frankly wasn’t all that hard, because there were hardly any employees in the Blackhawks organization. There was no receptionist. There was no human resources department. The business was being run by a part-timer. So McDonough cleared out the old guard because he figured they’d all be entrenched in the old way of thinking, and brought in his own people.

  McDonough immediately contacted his friends at WGN-TV and WGN Radio to get Blackhawks games on the air. It wasn’t an easy sell.

  “I basically groveled with them to take our games,” McDonough says. “I kept saying, ‘This thing is really coming and it’s going to come in a big way. It’s going to be fortuitous for you to get involved.’ They weren’t so sure if it was going to work, but they both jumped on board.”

  McDonough wanted to think big picture and make big ­sweeping changes, but he kept getting bogged down in the minutiae. Every day was an eye-opening experience about just how thin the staff was, just how poorly the business was run, just how cheap the organization had been.

  Three days into his tenure, McDonough was in his office ­trying to wrap his brain around the enormity of the task at hand—“Everything is on fire,” McDonough says—when head athletic trainer Mike Gapski poked his head in the doorway. He had a purchase order for $84, and for the second time in a day, he had interrupted the team president to sign it. The idea that a giant operation like the Chicago Blackhawks could come to a standstill because of a measly $84 is mind-boggling, but that’s just how things had been run.

  “Mike, can you close the door?” McDonough said. “What is this? You’ve got a budget. We can expand it if we need to.”

  “We just want you to know how things were previously done around here,” Gapski said. “We had to sign every single purchase order.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” McDonough says now. “They were ­reluctant to even give hockey bags to people. Just things I never ­imagined in baseball. They needed to think bigger, and I don’t know if there was an intimidation period or not for some of these guys, but I think they sensed from Day 1 that we were here to make things ­better for them. I mean, in some ways, this was incomprehensible. How could we have gone this long without some of these things? Even the ­quality of food in the press box. You’ve got to treat people well. This is an Original Six team in Chicago, Illinois, and we were not acting like a major-market team. All of that had to change.”

  Spending Rocky’s money was easy. Changing the culture around the team took a little more work. Image and presentation meant everything to McDonough, and he quickly laid out ground rules for public appearances and media availabilities. He hired a media coach to sanitize and homogenize players’ speaking styles and mannerisms during interviews.

  Blackhawks hats on at all times—never backward, either. Shirts must be worn at all times. Never talk while seated, always stand up. And when doing live television interviews, always say the interviewer’s name at the very beginning and the very end. Never “Thanks, guys.” Always, “Thanks, Eddie.” During the national anthem, players were to stand still and look at the flag, never stretch or sway or wobble.

  Given the young and raucous nature of the team that eventually won the Stanley Cup in 2010, it was a fine line to walk between managing their occasionally rowdy personalities and marketing them to young, enthralled fans.

  Even the players were sometimes confused.

  “We were all intimidated by John,” Burish says. “He had that presence and you didn’t want to screw up around him. You wanted to shake his hand and say his name every time. He intimidated everybody a little bit. You want to do things right around him, because you know he’s the boss. But then all of a sudden we’d do something stupid, or we’d do some goofy interviews, or they give Sharp and me a camera on the road to go and screw with guys, we’re like, ‘They’re okay with all this? We can get away with this? Well, let’s keep doing it, because this is fun.’ They allowed us to have personalities. They had rules, but we could stretch some things out. They let us have fun.”

  There were hits to that finely crafted image, of course. The ­highest-profile incident in those early years was in August of 2009, when Patrick Kane, then 20 years old, and his cousin James were arrested in Buffalo after getting into a fight with a cab driver after 4:00 am. The 62-year-old cabbie told police he was punched in the face, grabbed by the throat, and had his glasses broken in the ­altercation, which was allegedly over 20 cents in change. The Kanes pled guilty to a noncriminal charge of disorderly conduct and had to apologize to the cab driver. Kane told the judge before his sentencing that it was a “learning lesson” that was better to learn at a young age than “later in life.”

  It was hardly the only time a player found himself in hot water.

  “There were incidents that would come up, and we would ­handle all of those quietly and internally and nobody knew about them,” McDonough says. “That was part of the growing pains at the time, and we recognized that. Two years earlier, they were playing in front of 5,500 people. Now they go from being this garage band to all of a sudden, they’re selling out Soldier Field. I mean, really, really popular. They’d go to other cities and Blackhawks fans are following them everywhere. I’m proud of the way they handled it. We certainly had some bumps along the way. And it wasn’t just boys being boys. We didn’t tolerate that. We allowed them to grow and mature. But we addressed some of the things early on. They had fun together but within the boundaries of respect—for the most part. Not perfect.”

  The team is older and more buttoned-down these days, but all of McDonough’s rules still exist. Duncan Keith is the only one who really flaunts them, occasionally daring to stay shirtless during a ­postgame media scrum. Even a future Hall of Famer such as Marian Hossa is always looking over his shoulder, hoping to avoid the ire of McDonough, transmitted through the glare of media-­relations ­staffers. After a two-goal game in Dallas once, a few reporters approached Hossa in the locker room. He instinctively reached back for his hat, but it was nowhere to be found. After sheepishly apologizing, he scurried off to a side room and then returned, wearing a hat, now ready to talk about the game. Rules are rules. And McDonough makes the rules.

  After joining the Blackhawks front office as president in 2007, John McDonough’s first order of business was changing almost everything about the way the ­franchise operated. He and the team have been rewarded with three Stanley Cups in the years since.

  Each of these edicts seems ridiculous on its own. But added together, they create the most polished, corporate, marketable team in hockey. That was McDonough’s vision—the little details that add up to the big picture.

  The Blackhawks, after decades of pissing off their fans, now reached out to them. Two months into McDonough’s tenure, they brought back popular television announcer Pat Foley, who had an ugly falling out with the previous regime two years earlier. They ­created the Blackhawks Convention, now an annual summer ­gathering that draws thousands of fans to downtown Chicago in July for autographs and panel discussions. And they healed old wounds by declaring an end to the era of holding grudges and bringing back team ­legends Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull, and Tony Esposito (and later Denis Savard, after he was fired as head coach) as team “­ambassadors,” ­regular ­presences at the United Center and at ­community events throughout the area.

  Chicago has always been a hockey town, but it lay dormant for decades thanks to the archaic policies of Bill Wirtz. Rocky Wirtz and McDonough threw a bucket of cold water on the town to wake it back up. It was an all-out public-relations blitz, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The team was ready to take off, and Chicago was ready to go along for the ride.

  “Everything changed so quickly,” Ben Eager says. “We all noticed it right away—how much more professional it was. When John and Rocky came in, they made a lot of changes. John’s a m
arketing genius. Rocky made the game more accessible to people outside the rink. And then Kane and Toews coming along didn’t hurt things. It was kind of a perfect storm.”

  The Chosen Ones

  It was all there at 12 years old—the distinct, purposeful stride, the menacing glare, the bulldozing style, and, yes, the seriousness.

  So, so serious.

  Patrick Kane and the other kids would screw around all the time, in the locker room, during practices, even having mini-stick games in the hotel hallways. Not this other kid, though. He was there for one reason and one reason only: to play hockey.

  Yes, Kane can still think back to the first time he saw Jonathan Toews, and, well, he looked a lot like Jonathan Toews.

  “We were surprised at how serious and dedicated he was, even at that age,” Kane says.

  Their first encounter came when Kane’s Junior Flyers, a group out of the Toronto and Buffalo areas, played Toews’ Winnipeg Jets. And while the Flyers whipped the Jets by a 9–3 score, Toews was the standout, with all three Winnipeg goals.

  “We were like, ‘Wow, this kid’s amazing,’” Kane recalls.

  Amazing enough that Kane’s team recruited Toews for a couple of tournaments in Toronto and Montreal. And somehow, a team with two future Hall of Famers on it came up short.

  “We shit the bed,” Toews says.

  And that was that. The two preteens went their separate ways, but high-end prospects always keep an eye on other high-end prospects, especially from the same birth year. (“88s,” Kane calls them.) Kane kept tabs on Toews as he worked his way up through Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota and the University of North Dakota. And Toews occasionally followed what Kane was doing with the U.S. National Team Development Program, especially when he lit up the Ontario Hockey League for 62 goals and 83 assists in 58 games with the London Knights during the 2006–07 season.

  They never imagined they’d be drafted to the same team. That they’d be roommates for five years. That they’d win Stanley Cups together. That they’d be inextricably linked for all time, the faces of a franchise reborn, sure to be enshrined in statue form outside the United Center one day, the modern-day Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull, only bigger and more successful.

  Toews and Kane came to the Blackhawks with the world at their feet and the world on their shoulders. As the No. 3 pick in 2006 and the No. 1 pick in 2007, respectively, the handful of people left in Chicago who still cared about the “other” tenant at the United Center projected all their hopes and dreams, all their mounting frustration, all their pleas to the hockey gods on a couple of awkward teenagers—one of whom was too uptight, one of whom was far too loose.

  And they loved it.

  “They got excited off that,” Adam Burish says. “Kane likes that. He likes the spotlight. He likes everybody to look at him. He likes to put a show on. He likes to be entertaining. And Toews puts that pressure on himself regardless of what other people are saying. He could be playing in a market like Florida and he would still put that pressure on himself and expect a lot out of himself and demand a lot out of himself. Kane, he needs that put on him. He loves that kind of pressure. So it didn’t really affect them. It made them better players.”

  Having each other made them better, too. There were two of them to bear the brunt of the expectations, two of them to split the growing attention, two of them to transform the team. And despite their wildly different personalities, their on-ice chemistry—at their first prospects camp together, in the summer of 2007, they impressed even themselves with the highlight-reel plays they were dialing up right away—bled into their ­off-ice lives. A dynamic duo on the ice, an odd couple off it, the two became fast friends.

  Well, to a degree.

  “It was like an old married couple, always bickering with each other,” teammate Colin Fraser says with a laugh. “They certainly liked each other. But they had a love-hate relationship. They loved each other, but they spent so much damn time together that they’d get on each other’s nerves.”

  Need proof? Ask them about rooming together.

  Kane: “We were always on the same schedule, which is probably hard for people to believe. But we always went to sleep at the same time and we always took the same nap.”

  Toews: “What can I say, I like to get my sleep and he was a night owl. So he pissed me off a lot.”

  And like any married couple, they sometimes went to bed angry. That was usually Toews’ fault. There’s a reason Brent Seabrook ­saddled him with the nickname “Captain Serious”—a name that no longer fits the mellowed, easygoing yoga enthusiast, but one that he’ll never be able to escape. As a rookie facing high expectations, first as a 20-year-old captain, then as the face of the franchise, Toews always took work home with him. Losses stuck in his craw. A turnover ate at him. And heaven help a teammate who messed up along the way.

  Especially if that teammate was also his roommate.

  “You spend enough time with someone, you’re going to get sick of them, right?” Kane says. “It was good, but there were always arguments. Sometimes, something would happen on the ice where we’d be mad at each other even to the point where we wouldn’t talk to each other that night in the room. Maybe the next day, you start thinking about it and start laughing, but not always. That’s kind of where that name, Captain Serious, came from. And then you give him a name like that, and he just becomes even more serious about it.”

  The contrasting playing styles and the contrasting personalities away from the rink only added to their appeal among a fan base that was quickly starting to pay attention. Younger fans saw themselves in one player or the other, and gravitated to the duo and their brilliant play and goofy rapport.

  “I think everyone liked playing into those reputations, but they probably meet somewhere in the middle,” Patrick Sharp says. “I know Kaner has a reputation as being the party boy, the frat-boy guy, and Jonny’s Mr. Serious. But I think they both fall in between. Kaner’s a guy that cares about the game more than anything in his life. He just wants to be the best hockey player he can be, and he doesn’t get enough credit for that. And Jonny likes to have a good time more than he lets on. He’s always been an easy guy to hang out with off the ice. It’s just that staredown he gives you, and that competitive edge he plays with.”

  The attention only grew as the two blossomed as players. Kane won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year, with 21 goals and 51 assists. Toews was third in the voting, with 24 goals and 30 assists. Suddenly, they were being recognized on the street. Suddenly, they were doing commercials together. Suddenly, the United Center started filling up. Suddenly, Chicago ­remembered it had a hockey team, and these two bore the hopes of a city.

  “It was like the flip of a switch,” Kane says. “We were just ­treading along in 2007, and all of a sudden the city was really behind us. I don’t know if they just needed a sports team to cheer for or if everyone was waiting for hockey to come back. But it was fun. Overnight you become kind of celebrities in the city. Everything happened so fast.”

  But it never seemed to faze them.

  “Those two took the pressure really well,” Dave Bolland says. “They just put the pressure aside and didn’t let it get in their way. And they were unbelievable. You could tell right away they were going to be champions in this league.”

  And having each other to lean on helped—on and off the ice.

  “You’re 19, 20, 21 years old,” Kane says. “It’s almost like you’re too young and stupid to realize what’s even going on.”

  From the moment they took the ice together in 2007, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane made it clear that a new era had begun in Chicago.

  The Tortured Ones

  Despite the fact that they were first-round picks who didn’t really pay their dues—Jonathan Toews went right from a year at the University of North Dakota to the NHL, and Patrick Kane made the jump directly fr
om the Ontario Hockey League—the two kids fit right in with the Blackhawks. It was a whole team of kids, really.

  But here’s the thing about being the top picks on a team of young, single guys with too much time on their hands: they’re going to make your life a living hell.

  And on a team that relentlessly pranked everyone—resorting to old standbys such as putting shaving cream on towels, cutting the laces on someone’s skates, or just flat-out belittling people to their face in the cruelest, funniest ways imaginable—Kane and Toews were easy targets. And so Patrick Sharp and Adam Burish, roommates on the road and inveterate pains in the ass, launched a relentless assault on the sanity of the two centerpieces of the franchise.

  And not just when they were rookies. In their second year, too. And their third year. Their teammates never let up. Even when Kane was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in the league, even when Toews was the universally respected captain and undisputed leader of the team, they still were the targets. They were too ripe for the mocking, too naive to defend themselves. And Toews was too hilarious when he was pissed off.

  “One thing about Kaner and Tazer is that you knew right from the beginning of their careers, they were going to be great,” Sharp says. “Nowadays, these 18- and 19-year-old kids come into the league and they’ve got talent and it’s somewhat common across the league. But at that time, it was somewhat unheard of to see a teenager step in and be a top player and lead the team in scoring and demand the puck. We knew right away that they were great players and they were going to help our team a ton, and it was going to be awesome to have them around. At the same time, since they were getting all that attention, Bur and I took it upon ourselves to try to make things a little harder on them.”