Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I’m just a competitive person. That’s the way I play the game. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just part of the game, right? I’ll do anything.”

  “Is the intensity rising at camp?”

  “I don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow. Every day is different. Play hard and see what happens.”

  “You don’t fight very often, though.”

  “You don’t watch me. I fight off the ice sometimes, but nobody cares about that, though. I’d get into lots of fights when I was younger, too. Me and my buddies used to get into fights all the time, but nobody cared about that.”

  Then there were about five excruciating seconds of awkward silence that felt like five hours. Then Keith turned to Sassone and smirked.

  “Good one, right?”

  Was he being serious? Was Keith in a roaming gang of street toughs, picking fights “all the time” as a kid? Was he just messing around?

  That’s the thing with Keith. You never can tell. But it’s a good idea to keep your guard up around him—on or off the ice.

  Teuvo and Antti

  Teuvo Teravainen and Antti Raanta were bored. They had an afternoon off in Southern California, so they did what they did any chance they got on the road—they went shopping.

  And so the two Finns, the booming-voiced, gregarious Raanta and the quiet, shy Teravainen, left the team hotel, hopped in a cab, and found a mall in Marina Del Rey, where they ducked their heads into a half-dozen shoe stores. They tried on all sorts of colorful sneakers, briefly settling on a neon set of Nikes before the specter of kangaroo courts changed their minds. Those good ol’ Western Canadian boys don’t think much of European couture.

  “It was a little too much,” Raanta says. “If you’re wearing a pink shirt or something to practice, you know how the guys are. You always have to buy the black T-shirt and blue jeans. It’s a little boring. Maybe we have to go back to Chicago and buy those shoes and start bringing a little color to the team.”

  That plan never panned out. Outside of the Brent Burnses and P.K. Subbans of the world, the drab black toques and gray slacks of the hockey-player uniform rarely changes. But Raanta brought plenty of color to the Blackhawks, and especially to Teravainen. Their quirky friendship—they all but replaced the now-grown-up Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane as the Blackhawks’ odd couple—helped transform Teravainen from a deer in camera lights into a media darling.

  Teravainen arrived in Chicago in March of 2013 with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was promised as the Next Big Thing, the future of the franchise, the Finnish Kane. He was an otherworldly talent with the kind of moves that would draw fans out of their seats and keep the Blackhawks on top long into the eventual declines of Kane and Toews.

  He also was a small, thin, painfully shy 19-year-old kid who spoke softly, in mostly broken English. He certainly didn’t look the part of a superstar in waiting. That swagger that Kane had as a rookie? Teravainen had none of it.

  After coming over from Finland, he spent three games with the Blackhawks, failing to register a point, before finishing up the season in Rockford. The next fall, he arrived in camp still awkward, still uncomfortable, still adapting to hockey in North America, to life in the United States, and to the pressure that comes with being anointed a star in the making. He spent the first three months of the season in Rockford, posting a modest six goals and 19 assists in 39 games, before getting the call up to Chicago.

  He still wasn’t quite NHL-ready. Not entirely, at least. He had two goals and two assists in 15 games before going back to Rockford for one last two-week stint. But during that first 15-game stretch after New Year’s Day, Raanta started to coax Teravainen out of his shell.

  Turns out he was always funny, always as quick on his feet ­mentally as he is physically. But in another country, in another ­language, he was afraid to show it. So Raanta took him shopping. Raanta invited him to dinner with the guys. Raanta brought him into what Teravainen called “the joking club” in the dressing room. Raanta made Teravainen one of the guys.

  And Raanta also gave Teravainen a piece of home, far from home.

  “Sometimes you have those days when you just don’t want to talk English,” Raanta says. “Then you can just talk Finnish. We’ll just sit around talking about the Finnish league. He knows all the young guys who are there, and I know the older ones.”

  During the All-Star break, the Blackhawks scattered to the winds. Some went home to their families. Some went to Mexico or the Dominican Republic with their girlfriends or wives. Five of them went to Columbus for the All-Star Game itself. Raanta and Teravainen stayed in Chicago and played FIFA ’15 on Xbox—one place where Teravainen is anything but a shy kid.

  “We were playing NHL in training camp, but he was a little bit too good at that,” Raanta says. “So we stopped that and now we play soccer so I have a better chance to win.”

  Teravainen summed up their friendship oddly, and almost poetically: “We do all stupid things.”

  And when you’re a kid in a strange land with unyielding expectations, stupid things go a long way toward keeping your sanity. A little confidence off the ice can lead to some confidence on the ice.

  “He’s already chirping guys like [Andrew Shaw] does now,” Raanta said at the time. “When you talk Finnish with him, you can see that he’s also outgoing. He’s a really funny guy. So it’s good to see him coming out of that a little bit and getting along with the guys so good, so I don’t have to be there all the time. It’s a great thing to see. He’s smiling here, and he’s enjoying it.”

  When Teravainen was called up for good in late February to become an integral part of the Blackhawks’ run to the Stanley Cup, Raanta had been bumped as the Blackhawks’ backup by Scott Darling. But Teravainen had another Finn in the room—almost-40-year-old Kimmo Timonen, acquired at the trade deadline. Teravainen found a big brother in Raanta. Now he had what he called his “hockey dad.”

  Teravainen even got to play cagey veteran with the new guy who was twice his age, acting as his driver and tour guide to Chicago and to the Blackhawks dressing room.

  “It’s nice to have the older guy asking me questions,” Teravainen said. “I’ve been asking everyone else. Now I know something.”

  That kind of quip would have been unthinkable just five months earlier in training camp. And Teravainen was just getting started. Over the course of the next three months, Teravainen blossomed on the ice into a dynamic, versatile, reliable two-way player who posted four goals and six assists in the playoffs, including a goal in each of the first two games of the Stanley Cup Final in Tampa Bay. And he was a cut-up in front of the cameras—joking after his Game 1 goal that his first thought was, “Oh, no. I have to go do media now.”

  At the start of the season, Teravainen was a shy and painfully uncomfortable kid who still felt out of place in America. By the end of the season, he was a grown man, a confident English speaker, and a Stanley Cup champion. And a little help from his Finnish friends didn’t hurt.

  “You can definitely see it, just in his body language out there in practice,” Duncan Keith said. “Some of the moves he tries are so much about confidence. He’s played in the league now, he’s played deep in the playoffs, and he’s won a Stanley Cup already. So that gives him the confidence. He’s played in those pressure games. They’re not going to get any more pressure-packed or more intense than the ones he’s already played in.”

  “He’s really matured from year to year, but probably made his biggest step this year,” Joel Quenneville said. “He feels he belongs.”

  The Toughest Season

  The Stanley Cup was a few yards away, being hoisted over the heads of Black Aces (aka players called up from the American Hockey League or those working themselves back from injuries), middle management, and friends and family. Niklas Hjalmarsson—who alr
eady had his turn to parade the Cup around the United Center rink—had a moment to take a deep breath. To reflect. And to finally tell the truth.

  “I’m pretty tired,” he said.

  Tired from playing 275 hockey games in less than 30 months. Tired from 11 grueling playoff series in three seasons. Tired from playing more than 26 minutes per game through 23 playoff games that spring, as the Blackhawks’ blue line was mostly whittled down to a four-man rotation. Tired from a season full of tragedy and despair, uncertainty and unseemliness, rumor and innuendo.

  The 2010 Blackhawks had more fun than maybe any team in recent memory. The 2013 Blackhawks joyously romped through the best start and the most extraordinary finish in all of hockey history. The 2015 Blackhawks—well, they didn’t have much fun. At least, comparatively. Of the three championship runs, it was by far the toughest. On so many levels.

  The room was different that year, always businesslike and often somber. There was tension in the air, from salacious rumors about players’ personal lives and drinking habits circulating on talk radio and disreputable corners of the Internet. Patrick Sharp dealt with invasive speculation about his romantic life. Duncan Keith tried to lose himself in his work as he went through a life-altering divorce.

  And there was unfathomable grief from losing two members of the “family”—their word, every time—in assistant equipment ­manager Clint Reif and former defenseman Steve Montador.

  “It was a shitty year,” Sharp says.

  It was a grind from the start. The players constantly shrugged off the idea that they were worn out from playing so much more hockey than anyone else in the league, but occasional half-hearted efforts on the ice spoke volumes. The Blackhawks, who never sweat their playoff seed, go on cruise control for stretches during every regular season. But during the 2014–15 regular season, they couldn’t turn it on and off at will the way they used to.

  “That was the year we just really needed to find a way to get through the regular season, get to the playoffs, and have some real sense of purpose to the games again,” Jonathan Toews says. “If there ever was a time when we just turned the switch on, that was probably it. Going to the Final in 2013, the conference finals in 2014, going all the way to the playoffs that next year—that was where the hockey really added up.”

  After all, no matter how much NBC Sports Network hypes a random Wednesday night game, or no matter how much history two teams might have, the Blackhawks know all too well that no regular-season game is truly “important.” Not to them.

  “When you’re in the playoffs, you have a job to do and you put everything else aside and you focus on that job,” Sharp says. “You’re not really caught up in how many games we’ve played or how tired we may be. But you feel it in training camp the next year. You feel it in those ‘big’ regular-season games in October, November, December, January, that really aren’t that big. Yeah, the Blackhawks go into Washington to play the Capitals in January, that’s a ‘big game.’ But it’s really not a big game when you were just in the Stanley Cup Final a couple months ago. It was harder for guys to get up for the day-to-day grind of the regular season when we were going deep in the playoffs like that. Maybe that’s why you saw the slumps in February and March.

  “I don’t think ‘cruise control’ is even the right way to put it. You still want to play, and you want to score, and you want to win, but it’s almost like, holy shit, we’re really doing this again? Here? Wednesday night in Carolina? And the other team is fired up because the Blackhawks are in town. They’re playing their best and they want to beat you. It’s just tough to do it every night. But credit the Blackhawks, they find a way to manage it somehow. I think that’s Q more than anything.”

  The Blackhawks plugged away though the first couple months of the season, the lowlight being an ankle injury that Corey Crawford suffered at a Rise Against concert at the House of Blues. Joel Quenneville was so irate about Crawford’s injury that he broke team protocol and had Crawford address reporters immediately after it happened, rather than wait until he was healthy. Antti Raanta and newcomer Scott Darling had a nice goalie competition going in the meantime, as the Blackhawks cruised to a solid late November and early December.

  But then their world fell apart around them on the morning of December 21, when they learned that Reif, a well-liked 34-year-old assistant equipment manager, was found dead in his Lombard, Illinois, home, mere hours after he and the team returned from a game in Columbus the previous night. Reif’s death was later ruled a suicide, and it shook the Blackhawks to their core. Reif left behind a wife and four young children.

  The players were the last to know. When they showed up to the rink in the afternoon—there was no morning skate because of the game the previous night—Quenneville called everyone into the dressing room, and the entire support staff came in, eyes red, stifling sobs. The stoic Quenneville was barely able to keep it together as he told the players what happened.

  “It may be underrated to a fan or someone outside the locker room, who doesn’t quite understand what the trainers mean to our group,” Toews says. “They’re brothers. They’re part of the family—on the ice, on the plane, in the locker room. They’re in the trenches every minute with the players. They work hard. They’re there every step of the way. And if they’re not doing their job or they’re off their game, everyone knows it, because what they do is so valuable to each player. They know what makes each player comfortable with their equipment, and how to make sure they’re ready to play every single day. They have such a close friendship, a close bond with the players. They’re not trainers, they’re teammates. To lose a guy like Clint, who off the ice brought so much personality and always seemed to be part of the social energy in our locker room—it was a tough loss for everybody. We still miss him a lot.”

  The Blackhawks dedicated that night’s game against the Maple Leafs to Reif’s memory, and somehow—still nobody’s sure how they did it—pulled out an inspired 4–0 victory. Quenneville’s eyes were red as he spoke to reporters, and players choked back tears, too.

  “Obviously, it was tough, when you lose a close friend and try to play a hockey game on the same day,” Keith said afterward. “It wasn’t easy.”

  The Blackhawks wore Reif’s initials on their helmets for the rest of the season—as did former Blackhawks and other players scattered around the league, including Dustin Byfuglien in Winnipeg—and Quenneville had CR emblazoned on his jacket.

  “You’re with these guys every day,” Brent Seabrook says. “Every day. You’re on the road with them. Whatever you need, they’re family. They’re there to take care of you. And part of our family is not around anymore. It’s pretty tough.”

  Tragedy struck again less than two months later, on February 15, when Montador was found dead in his home in Mississauga, Ontario, at the age of 35. The former Blackhawks defenseman had been dealing with the after-effects of head trauma, ­battling ­depression and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). His death hit hard for many of the Blackhawks who had played ­alongside him. But nobody was more devastated than Daniel Carcillo, one of Montador’s closest friends. The two fought ­alcohol and substance abuse together. They played alongside each other. They, too, were brothers.

  The Blackhawks were hosting the Pittsburgh Penguins in an 11:30 am nationally televised matinee that day. Carcillo, who had gotten the news first, made it through warmups with tears in his eyes, but back in the room before the opening faceoff, it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to play that day.

  “I looked over and saw Car Bomb, just looking at his phone in the change room,” Toews recalls. “He’s in his full equipment, ­sitting there, fighting back tears. After warmups, I had to pull him into a room to see what was going on, and what was wrong. No guy, no matter what he’s going through, is going to pull his own jersey off and pull the chute. So I told him, ‘You’ve got to go talk to the coaches right now. You can’t play today.’
He was pretty heartbroken and didn’t want to pull himself out of the game, but he knew he had to.”

  Carcillo took a few days to attend Montador’s funeral and to gather himself before returning for one game a week later. He only played two games the rest of the season after that, as he dealt with his own concussion. In a poignant video posted to the Players Tribune, Carcillo spoke emotionally about the “lull and depression” he fell into. And he pointed out how Toews and Sharp were among the players who reached out to him.

  “It meant a lot,” Carcillo said in the video. “To be in such a dark place emotionally and then to have them care…When I think about that, a big reason I summoned the courage to do this, my hope is that it helps somebody and opens the right eyes, and people get in ­contact with our [players’ association] and get in touch with each other, and we can try to create something that’s going to help athletes figure out what they’re good at, and what they want to do next in life. I know Steve this past year was trying to figure that out. I wish he had. Because I think it would have eased his mind and I think if he had the right help that he would still be here with us.”

  Carcillo spun the tragedy into something positive, urging the NHL and the NHLPA to do more to help former players, and ­creating his Chapter 5 Foundation, which offers support to retired players as they transition into the next phase of their lives, especially if they’re dealing with head trauma, depression, or anxiety.

  And once again, the Blackhawks tried to push forward, and honor Reif’s and Montador’s memories the only way they knew how.

  “As players, you have to find a way, find the strength to get through those things as players and as people,” Keith says. “There’s nothing else you can do but remember them and mourn them.”

  “A lot of sad things happened for the team,” Marcus Kruger says. “It’s something that’s emotionally tough for everyone. But I think that kept us closer to each other and helped make us tight as a group.”

  “We lost some friends and it brought our team together,” Andrew Shaw says. “It helped us focus more, making us realize that things can change that quickly. I think, in a way, it helped fuel us late in the season.”