Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  Quenneville treated the Blackhawks like adults off the ice, too. He didn’t linger in the dressing room. He didn’t monitor every conversation. He didn’t have spies lurking.

  As long as the Blackhawks worked their asses off on the ice, he’d let them be off of it. That’s why, despite the stern glares and the harsh words and the disciplinarian aura, Quenneville always has been a “players’ coach.”

  He was a player once. A hard-working, hard-partying player, to hear tales from those days. And so he let his players be. Once in a while, he’d poke his head into the dressing room to pour himself a cup of coffee when the pot in the coaches’ office ran out. Other than that, he was a ghost.

  “He was the only coach I ever had where it never felt like he was on top of you away from the rink,” Burish says. “He’s on the ice, and then you don’t see him. He gave us our space and he went and found his own space. Most other coaches, they come around the locker room when you’re eating lunch and they’ll sit there and listen to what you’re saying. You always feel like you’re being watched. He let us be. Other teams I’ve been on, guys sit and eat lunch and get out of there. That team, we’d just sit in the locker room for an hour after practice telling stories about last night, or figuring out what we were doing tonight, what we’re doing tomorrow, because we knew nobody was listening. We could be ourselves and we could have fun. It made us closer as a team, because guys would just hang out longer. Quenneville let us run wild.”

  “When we were on the ice, it was all business,” Ben Eager says. “But he let the guys control the dressing room. The way he coaches is different. We’re grown men and we’re getting paid good money. Video sessions were short, practices were short and fast. He lets you know what you did right and what you did wrong. He tells you why you’re playing, or if you’re sitting, he’ll give you the exact reason why. He’s in, he’s out. He does his quick little speech and he expects you to show up and work on the ice. And if you don’t, you’re out. Or you’re gone. He just has such a great feel for the team, when guys need a day off, when they need to be pushed. A lot of coaches don’t have that. But he’s been around so long, he never questioned himself, where other coaches worry about every decision they make. Q knows.”

  During games, Quenneville was—and continues to be—harsh but fair. He’s never had a problem stapling a player to the bench for a foolish penalty or a ghastly turnover. But he’s never had a problem giving role players significant minutes at important times of the game when warranted. While Savard might throw a fourth-liner on to the top line to give him a burst of confidence, Quenneville would simply give the entire fourth line top-line minutes when they deserved them.

  “For me as a player, as a fourth-line guy, the reason why I think Q is an awesome coach is he’s got such a good feel for his bench,” Colin Fraser says. “Most coaches have everything set—the first line’s going to play 20 minutes, the second line’s going to play 18 minutes, the third line’s going to play 15 minutes, and the fourth line’s going to play eight to 10, no matter what. But if me, [Ben] Eager, and [Tomas] Kopecky were having a good game, he’d let us run. We’d play 11, 12, 13, 14 ­minutes, ­whatever. And if we were having a bad game, we’d play seven. As a player, you didn’t feel this burden that, oh, man, I have to play good every shift because I’ll only get eight minutes. It was, hey, if we play good, he’s going to keep rolling you over and you’ll get more minutes.

  “Being a fourth-liner, it’s a different mentality than a first-line guy. They always get their minutes. For me, that’s not always the case. But Q would put us out there at the end of a tight game. He puts that trust in players. Now you can just play and you’re not uptight. Elsewhere, we used to call it one-and-done. In other words, don’t make a mistake because you’ll get one shift and be done. With Q, you don’t have to worry about that.”

  That said, Quenneville’s patience can run thin. And woe unto any player who finds himself in Quenneville’s crosshairs. As calm as he is before and after games, he’s every bit the raving lunatic he looks like during games. The mustache twitches, the arms flail, the tie flaps, the spittle flies, and the F-bombs rain down. Just about every player who’s come through the organization since 2008, and every referee who’s crossed his path, has been told to “fuck off” at some point or another.

  Even after more than 2,500 games as a player and coach, that fire hasn’t died down a lick.

  “He gets pretty fired up when he’s on the bench,” Marian Hossa says. “When there’s something he doesn’t like, he lets the referees or the players know.”

  At first, players found it shocking, especially compared to the relatively docile and demure Denis Savard. But after a while, the trick became not laughing in his face, because really, it’s hard to keep a straight face when your coach screams into the void, “I’m going to go fucking mental in this fucking game tonight!”

  “We’re used to it now,” Kane says. “To the point where if he says something, you nudge the guy next to you on the bench and laugh about the thing he says. He’s got some good comments back there. We enjoy it. Honestly, it gets us into the game, too.”

  “Oh, sometimes you get a good chuckle,” Bryan Bickell says. “He knows that we can hear him, and I think he knows we’re laughing. But it’s good to see him so caught up in it. It inspires me and the team. Like he says, nobody likes winning more than him.”

  “He’s so funny,” Fraser says. “We laugh all the time. We still tell ­stories about Q. I don’t know if he’s trying to be funny, but he’s so funny.”

  In those early years, perhaps no person found himself on the receiving end of a Quenneville tongue-lashing more frequently than Kris Versteeg. Versteeg always fancied himself a Kane-like player and would try to make Kane-like plays, only he didn’t quite possess ­Kane-like skill. Versteeg was the ultimate high-risk, high-reward player, the kind of guy who could make a brilliant play that would end up in the opponents’ net and follow it up with a boneheaded pass that ended up in his own net.

  At one point during the 2009–10 season, Versteeg came down the wing and tried a ridiculous between-the-legs shot. He didn’t score, but nothing bad happened, either. As Versteeg came back to the bench for a change, Quenneville was literally running down the bench in his direction.

  “Versteeg! If you ever do that again, I’ll punch you right between the eyes, do you hear me?” Quenneville screamed.

  “Me and Troy Brouwer were crying laughing,” Fraser recalls. “It was the funniest thing we’d ever seen. Then it became a thing. Every time someone turned the puck over, we’d all yell, ‘Versteeg!’ He’d be on the bench and I’d be on the ice and turn it over, and Brouwer would yell, ‘Fucking Versteeg! Are you kidding me?’”

  Of course, Versteeg—like Andrew Shaw in later years—was also one of Quenneville’s most beloved players, the kind of scrappy, pain-in-the-ass player that Quenneville adores. There was almost nothing Versteeg could do to get himself benched in those early years. But it didn’t feel that way.

  “He’d always be bitching, ‘Q hates me, Q hates me,’” Fraser says. “We’d all be like, ‘You played 20 minutes last night. He doesn’t hate you.’”

  But that intensity, that bottomless passion, is what helped ­transform the Blackhawks from a bunch of loosey-goosey kids into a powerhouse. Quenneville infused his players with the same dogged determination and myopic obsession with winning he had, and it ­carried them to the Western Conference final in his first season and a Stanley Cup in his second season.

  Savard molded the clay. Quenneville threw it into the fire.

  “He stayed away and let the guys control the dressing room,” Eager says. “But when we were out on the ice, it was all business. He’s the best coach I’ve ever played for. Without him, all those Cups? They don’t happen.”

  Derby Daze

  An NHL dressing room can be a loose place. After a practice or a morning skate, guys ar
e chatting, making plans, mocking each other and opponents, the usual stuff. But before a game—particularly before a playoff game—there’s much more tension in the air. Conversations are short and to the point. Guys are taping sticks intently, making tiny adjustments to their gear, going through their pregame routines. Brent Seabrook will randomly spout “Let’s go get ’em”–type clichés. It’s all business.

  But before Game 2 of the Blackhawks’ second-round ­playoff series with the Vancouver Canucks in 2009, it was a little looser than usual. The team showed up a little early for the odd 6:10 pm Pacific start time so they could watch the Kentucky Derby together in the dressing room. Everyone was at their stalls, waiting for Joel Quenneville’s pregame meeting, watching the race.

  Pretty soon after the horses broke from the starting gate, Quenneville’s booming voice started leaking into the dressing room from the coaches’ office.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  As the horses rounded the final turn and headed for the home stretch, the yelling got louder.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  “Then it goes quiet for maybe two or three seconds,” recalls Troy Brouwer. “And then all we hear is Q yelling and screaming and going crazy. He comes running into the dressing room screaming, ‘Wooooooooo! Wooooooooo!’ He does about three hot laps around the room, just screaming nonsense: ‘Here we go, boys! We’re gonna get this one tonight, boys!’”

  The Blackhawks were baffled by what had just happened. They had never seen Quenneville like that before.

  “Guys are looking at each other like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” Andrew Ladd said.

  At that point, assistant coach Mike Haviland poked his head into the room and told everyone that Quenneville had just hit the trifecta for a five-digit payday. Nobody’s sure just how much he won that night, but a $1 bet would have landed him $20,750.30. So it was worth screaming about.

  “I’d be pretty fired up if I hit the trifecta, too,” Ladd says with a laugh.

  And that was it. That was the whole “meeting.” With the Blackhawks—a bunch of kids in their first postseason together—trailing in the series 1–0 and facing a hostile road environment, that was Quenneville’s entire pregame preparation. He was too amped up for anything else.

  The Blackhawks went out two hours later and beat the Canucks 6–3 to even the series, and went on to advance to the Western Conference final. Everyone’s a winner.

  “Right before we’re about to go on the ice for a playoff hockey game,” Brouwer says. “It was the funniest moment I’ve ever had in hockey.”

  Laying the Groundwork

  Dale Tallon was sitting on Bill Torrey’s couch in West Palm Beach, Florida, when Patrick Kane scored the Stanley Cup–winning goal in Game 6 of the 2010 Stanley Cup Final about 1,100 miles straight up I-95 in Philadelphia.

  It was a strange feeling. Or, perhaps more accurately, a lot of strange feelings. There was pure joy for so many friends he made in Chicago, so many staffers he hired, so many players he plucked from obscurity. There was pride, for how big of a role he played in that championship. And there was sadness, for how removed he was from it, now the general manager of the Florida Panthers, having been all but kicked aside less than a year earlier after a contract snafu that cost the Blackhawks millions of dollars.

  Tallon wasn’t on the ice for the Stanley Cup celebration. He wasn’t in the locker room for the raucous partying. But make no mistake, that was his Stanley Cup, too. And everybody knew it. So even in the midst of the drunken revelry in the visitors dressing room at Wells Fargo Center, the jubilant Blackhawks took a moment to include Tallon in on the fun. Joel Quenneville called him up and put him on speakerphone, with the ­players giving him a big cheer and toasting a couple dozen beers in his honor.

  “It was an amazing moment,” Tallon says. “It was bittersweet, obviously, but I was so happy for the players, and Joel, and the staff. I was so proud of them.”

  If a player gets traded or released near the end of the regular season, and the team goes on to win the Stanley Cup, that player doesn’t get his name etched on the silver trophy. And in theory, Tallon shouldn’t have, either—he was an employee of the Florida Panthers when the Blackhawks knocked off the Flyers. But there he is, between Scotty Bowman and Quenneville, the first name on the third line, followed by so many of the players he drafted, signed, and traded for as he engineered one of hockey’s great turnarounds.

  Following his 10-year NHL career, which included five seasons in Chicago, Tallon wound up calling Blackhawks games as a color analyst for 16 seasons. The dark ages didn’t affect Tallon’s job much—he was living the life, a golf pro in the summer and a broadcaster in the winter—but the relentless grind of trying to liven up a dead franchise on the air became an arduous task. In the late 1990s, general manager Bob Murray invited him into the front office as director of player personnel, and Tallon jumped at the chance.

  “It was fun broadcasting with Pat Foley, but the team was in ­disarray,” Tallon says. “When Bob Murray asked me if I’d have some interest in getting involved in scouting and helping him out, I was really excited to do it. Because I was not enjoying ­broadcasting bad games. I was tired of making stuff up on the radio to keep things interesting.”

  Tallon worked his way up to general manager in 2005, fresh out of the lockout that wiped out the entire 2004–05 season. Assuming—like so many did—that the NHL’s proclaimed crackdown on ­obstruction wouldn’t last long, Tallon tried to build a team that fit the model of that era. It failed, with the 2005–06 Blackhawks ­finishing third-to-last in the league.

  And it was the best thing that ever happened to the Chicago Blackhawks, because it landed them Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in each of the next two drafts.

  “We tried to get a team that was tough on the ice, but they stuck to their guns with the rule changes, and our team wasn’t very good,” Tallon says. “But our No. 1, primary goal was to accumulate as many draft picks as possible, as many assets as possible.”

  The Blackhawks made 17 selections in the 2004 draft, among them Dave Bolland, Bryan Bickell, and seventh-rounder Troy Brouwer. They had 12 picks in the 2005 draft, spending one on fourth-rounder Niklas Hjalmarsson. They grabbed Toews with the No. 3 pick in the 2006 draft, and Kane with the top pick in the 2007 draft. Tallon had already drafted players such as Duncan Keith (second-rounder in 2002), Adam Burish (ninth-rounder in 2002), Brent Seabrook (first-rounder in 2003), Corey Crawford (second-rounder in 2003), and Dustin Byfuglien (eighth-rounder in 2003). He acquired Patrick Sharp from Philadelphia during the 2005–06 season for a third-round pick.

  And as Toews and Kane changed the trajectory of the franchise in their rookie season of 2007–08, Tallon started filling in the gaps. He acquired Kris Versteeg in a minor-league trade. He swung a deal to bring in Andrew Ladd at the trade deadline of Toews and Kane’s rookie season. He signed defenseman Brian Campbell before the 2008–09 season. He signed veteran defensive forward and former Selke Trophy winner John Madden the ­following summer.

  It was a team built on speed and skill. It was a team with happy coincidences as Seabrook, Brouwer, Versteeg, and Fraser all knew each other from back home in British Columbia. And it was a team of young, rowdy, often crazy personalities—just the way Tallon liked them.

  “I like characters with character,” Tallon says. “I don’t like cookie-cutter guys who are altar boys. I like guys who have some spunk, but really care. I wanted all those things along with the size, speed, and skill. They weren’t married, they were all single, young guys. There were a lot of characters and they all really added different pieces. It was a really fun group. They could give shit, take shit, and not give a shit. That was the model. Nothing was sacred. Everybody was respectful of each other, and everybody cared for each other, on and off the ice. It was a great group of guys.”

  Loyal, too. The team’s extraordinary closeness was at its most poignant d
uring the annual circus trip in 2008. The Blackhawks, evicted from the United Center by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, set out on a six-game road trip to Phoenix, Dallas, Toronto, San Jose, Anaheim, and Los Angeles. There was a three-day break after the Toronto game on November 22, and the Blackhawks planned to fly home to Chicago for a couple of nights before heading out west.

  The night before the game in Toronto, Tallon’s father, Stan, died at age 80. The next night, the Blackhawks rallied from 3–0 and 4–2 deficits to beat the Maple Leafs 5–4, with Bolland scoring the game-winning goal in overtime. After the game, depending on who you talk to, the players either took a unanimous vote or were strongly urged by management to stay in Toronto another night and bus the two hours north to Gravenhurst, Ontario, to attend Stan Tallon’s wake. Regardless of how it came about, the team was fully on board with the idea, glad to sacrifice a precious day off at home to support the man who brought them all together.

  “It was a no-brainer,” Burish says. “He would have done the same thing for us.”

  “I felt all along it was the right thing to do, and everyone else in the organization felt the same way,” John McDonough says. “I’m not sure some of the players had ever been to a wake before. They weren’t necessarily sure what to do. But there was a sense of unity to that team.”

  Tallon had an inkling it might happen. He had picked up one of his sons at a small local airport, and they were listening to the Leafs broadcast on the radio. The announcer said the Blackhawks were ­talking about making the trip up to Gravenhurst, but Tallon didn’t tell anybody. And when the entire team walked into the funeral, Tallon’s mother, Julie, was overcome. She was a huge hockey fan, of course, and had a particular affection for Kane.

  “My mother’s face lit up,” Tallon says. “That was just incredible that they decided to do that. That tells you a lot about that team. A lot of people thought it was a made-up story on the Internet, because it was so unbelievable. But it tells you what those guys were all about.”