Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  He didn’t care.

  “That was the best 20 minutes of my life,” he says.

  At the tail end of warmups, Patrick Kane—reigning MVP and scoring champion and the man who stuck the dagger in Semborski’s chest with his Cup-winning goal in 2010—fired a wrist shot at him from just inside the right circle. Semborski got enough of it, sending it high and wide. Maybe Kane was throwing him a bone. Maybe not. Who cares, really?

  “That was pretty cool,” Semborski says. “I’ll remember that one.”

  That was the extent of Semborski’s action. He sat at the end of the bench on his stool and just enjoyed the best seat he’ll ever have for an NHL game. Joel Quenneville suggested—almost certainly in jest—that Semborski was close to going into the game when Darling gave up three goals in a four-shot span in the second period. Semborski laughed at the thought.

  “That probably would have been a big mistake,” he says.

  But he did almost get in the game. With the Blackhawks trailing 3–1 late in the third, Quenneville pulled Darling for an extra attacker. Semborski didn’t know it at the time, but had the Flyers scored an empty-netter to put the game away, he would have gone in for the final minute or so.

  “That would have been so cool,” he says. “But I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  Semborski was such a great story that his postgame press scrum had to be held outside the cramped visitors dressing room at Wells Fargo, out in the hallway. For nearly 10 minutes, he cracked jokes and marveled at the situation, calling it the best birthday present ever for his dad, Joe, who turned 58 that day.

  Semborski is a lifetime Flyers fan who never really got over 2010. Well, until that Sunday.

  “That was one of the hardest things I ever watched,” he said of Kane’s Cup-winner. “But today, that’s all forgotten. I’m a Blackhawks fan today.”

  Epilogue

  It’s a Thursday night in Nashville, early during the 2016–17 ­season. Thursday night, of course, is a party night in Nashville. Hell, every night’s a party night in Nashville. It’s around 7:00 pm, and Ryan Hartman is hanging out with a few friends at Rippy’s, a popular rib joint right next to Bridgestone Arena. He’s ­drinking water. He graciously picks up the tab for a couple of reporters he spots a few tables over, and his crew is gone by 7:30. Time to call it a night. There’s a game tomorrow.

  Welcome to the modern-day NHL. Party on.

  “Everything’s changed,” Colin Fraser laments. “Who are you out getting a beer with? These kids come into the league, and all they do is play video games. From birth, all these kids are born and bred superstars. From five years old, all they do is live, breathe, and eat hockey. They’re like robots. They’re professional athletes, they have perfect bodies, they don’t put any poisons into their body, they engage in no extracurriculars. They’re boring as shit. We’d get into Nashville and we’d roll right out to Tootsie’s. Not 10 of us. Twenty of us. Every time. Every team I played with. These guys? They’re all in their rooms. My buddies on other teams say the same thing. There’s no fun anymore.”

  Sure, Fraser sounds like an old man yelling at clouds, or ­shooing some kids off his lawn, but there’s truth in that rant. A 21-year-old coming into the league now is a hell of a lot different than a 21-year-old coming into the league just a decade earlier. Part of it is social media, and the fear of getting caught actually doing things you’d expect a rich, young, single person to do. Part of it is the ever-­evolving NHL, and how much harder you have to work and how ­perfect you have to be in order to stay in a league that’s only getting faster and stronger every year. And part of it is the culture of youth hockey, how elite young players are built to be hockey automatons, their individuality bred right out of them.

  So it’s different these days in the Blackhawks dressing room. The 2016–17 roster was the youngest since those anarchic, halcyon days of the late 2000s, when the dark clouds were being lifted and the city’s younger generations fell in love with a rowdy group of party animals that looked like them and acted like them. But this next generation of Blackhawks is different.

  On the ice, Hartman has that same edge that Dustin Byfuglien, Adam Burish, Ben Eager, and Andrew Shaw had. Off the ice, he’s a very humble, pleasant guy. Nick Schmaltz has some of that Patrick Kane flair to his game, but is a very serious man off the ice, his focus entirely on hockey and his career. Vinnie Hinostroza has been friends with Hartman since they were little kids, both local guys. But now that they’ve reached the pinnacle together, making tons of money with their hometown team? They blow off steam on off nights by going out to dinner, then playing Rory McIlroy PGA Tour on Xbox.

  At the start of the 2016–17 season, second-year pro Dennis Rasmussen took 20-year-old rookie Gustav Forsling under his wing. Combined, they had an average salary of about $1.4 million. Young, single, rich, and becoming more famous by the day. But when the Blackhawks moved the two out of their downtown luxury hotel and into an extended-stay Residence Inn—a sign of accomplishment, a sign that the Blackhawks expected them to stick around the NHL long term—they celebrated by making tacos in their new kitchen. It turns out Swedes have Taco Tuesday also, only it’s on Fridays—Taco Fredag, to be exact. The Swedes refer to it as fredagsmys, and it involves staying in on Friday nights, making tacos, and watching a movie.

  Forsling cooked the ground beef, while Rasmussen chopped the vegetables.

  Party on, indeed.

  It’s not bad, it’s just different. Well, okay, the guys from that 2010 team—the very last of a now-extinct breed, of old-school hockey, of hard drinking and hard living and hard hitting—think it’s bad.

  “That’s how it always was,” Brent Sopel says. “I don’t care who you are, even if you’re not an athlete, go back to your days in ­college. Everybody’s done that stuff. The stupid shit we did pre–cell phones and all that stuff—that’s what you do when you’re young and dumb. We were always out, having a good time. It’s just not like that ­anymore.”

  It’s been a gradual process, the color and personality slowly drained from the team through free agency and trades, so many of them salary-cap casualties. The 2010 team lost a good chunk of its soul when Byfuglien, Eager, and Ladd were shipped to Atlanta, and Fraser to Edmonton, and Kris Versteeg to Toronto, and when Burish signed with San Jose and John Madden with Minnesota. Over the years, they lost more personality when Troy Brouwer was sent to Washington, and Dave Bolland to Toronto, and Shaw to Montreal. The Blackhawks have managed to replace those players on the ice, but they haven’t been able to replace those characters, those unique individuals, off the ice. They just don’t make them like that anymore.

  Ladd saw the difference when he returned at the trade deadline in 2016.

  “It was a little different, yeah,” he says. “The biggest difference for me was the room was different—you had that split of guys who had been there a long time and had families, and all the young guys who were pretty quiet in the dressing room and didn’t say a whole lot. It’s not like when we’d all go out on the road, 10 or 15 at a time. That really doesn’t happen in the NHL anymore.”

  Campbell saw it when he took a huge payout to come back “home” for the 2016–17 season after five seasons in Florida.

  “You learn to mature,” he says. “I think it’s the same with all sports. When Instagram and Twitter came along and everything, it changed. You look at it now, and you’ve got to be so buttoned-up and ready to go at all times. Back then, we were a young group of guys that had fun. A lot of those guys played in the minors together and got drafted around the same time and so we were close. We enjoyed going out and having fun and having a beer or two together. I think it made us a better team. It made us a very likable team, too, because we were out there. Now, the older guys, the core, they’re in the primes of their careers now, they’ve got families and everything. It’s still great here, it’s still the best organization. It’s different, but it’s onl
y gotten better.”

  And even Johnny Oduya noticed it when he returned at the trade deadline in 2017 after less than two years in Dallas.

  “I think society as a whole changes a lot, too,” Oduya says. “Now, compared to 10 or 20 years ago, there are a lot of things that are ­different. Obviously, the speed and the skill of the game is ­something you didn’t really see, not even 10 years ago. The mentality of the ­players—they’re more dedicated off the ice. Everybody wants to make an impact and be a good player. As an older guy, I actually kind of like it. There’s a lot of things you have to do to keep up with them, but that’s good, and it keeps you young.”

  For the remaining active members of the core, the three-time Stanley Cup champions—Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, and now, again, Patrick Sharp—there’s a lot of hockey left to be played. But as they approach 30, or in some cases, leave it far behind, they change. They mature. They evolve. In 2010, they were kids. By 2015, many of them were grown men with kids of their own. The United Center had turned into a day-care center before and after games—little Theo Hjalmarsson toddling around the hallways, whacking a rubber ball with a mini-stick, little Ames Desjardins high-fiving passersby as his dad carried him around, little Zoja Hossa honking her daddy’s nose during a ceremony commemorating his 500th career goal.

  Those late-2000s Blackhawks were chasing the older, more accomplished Red Wings. Now, they are the Red Wings.

  “It really is like it was in Detroit,” Hossa says. “Everybody grew up.”

  Of course, glory is fleeting, and nothing lasts forever. Hjalmarsson was traded to Arizona. Hossa’s playing days are likely over, his brilliant career cut short by a skin disorder severely aggravated by the wearing of hockey equipment. Now, a new wave of fresh faces, such as Ryan Hartman and Nick Schmaltz, and journeymen veterans such as Richard Panik are hoping to recapture the magic. It won’t be easy.

  The Hawks didn’t become the Red Wings overnight, of course. There were stumbles along the way. Some of them, like a shirtless limo ride in Vancouver, were easy to laugh off. Others, like the police investigation into a sexual-assault allegation against Patrick Kane in the summer after the 2015 Cup run, were far more serious.

  But with age comes perspective, and, according to Campbell, maturity.

  “You’re proud of a guy like Kaner,” he says. “I know he’s had his troubled times and stuff, but you look at him now, and you know what? He’s grown with that situation. The Blackhawks supported him and I know it wasn’t easy sometimes supporting him in some of those situations. But I look at him now, and what a stand-up guy. He’s lived and learned. I think everybody should be proud of how he is, and who he is. I love being around the guy, he’s great.”

  As for the players who have left, either for other teams or ­retirement, they’ll always be a part of Chicago lore, part of the group that resurrected a franchise and reawakened a long-dormant hockey town. All championship teams have a bond, an unbreakable link forged in the fire of a grueling, nine-month slog of pain, sacrifice, and glory. But few teams seem to share the affection that the originators of the Blackhawks renaissance do.

  “We still see each other all the time,” Eager says. “We’re still a close group. Anytime you’re in the same city as one of those guys, you look up whoever was on that team. We reach out to each other all the time.”

  For John McDonough and Rocky Wirtz, the principal architects of the turnaround, old faces are always welcome in the new spacious United Center office building opened in the winter of 2017. And they frequently drop by for a visit—Burish and Fraser and Eager and Bolland and Michal Handzus and Daniel Carcillo and anyone else who’s in town. McDonough calls it “a hockey orphanage.”

  They live all over the continent now—from British Columbia to Florida, from Wisconsin to Arizona, and everywhere in between. But Chicago—where they grew up together, where they partied together, where they worked together, where they breathed life into a dying franchise together, where they started a torrid love affair with millions of fans together—will always be home.

  Even if it’s a little tamer than it used to be.

  “It was a special group,” Fraser says. “And it might never be like that again, for any of us. But we got to live it. And no matter what happens, nobody can take it away from us.”

  Acknowledgments

  Wedged into a chair between two rows of tables in the cramped Joe Louis Arena press room, I went to work on my master opus.

  The Blackhawks were trailing the Detroit Red Wings 2–1 through two periods in Game 6 of the 2013 Western Conference semifinals, and it was time to start writing my epic postmortem. Like Ralphie Parker writing his ode to the Red Ryder BB Gun, rarely had the words poured from my fingertips with such feverish fluidity.

  It was all going to get blown up. Stars were going to be traded. Either Joel Quenneville or Stan Bowman—or both—was going to get fired. A soft goal midway through the second period had ­reinforced the negative narrative on Corey Crawford dating back to the Coyotes series a year earlier. The Blackhawks, after the greatest half-season in hockey history, were going to be reduced to a pile of ­smoldering ­rubble, with only Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane left to build around. The formula had failed. Three straight premature playoff exits. The Blackhawks were one-hit wonders.

  By the time the puck dropped to start the third period, my story—no, my dirge—was nearly complete. It was a tale of opportunity lost, of history wasted, of a championship window slamming shut on the fingers of so many.

  Then Michal Handzus scored 51 seconds into the third period.

  Command-A. Delete. Time to start over.

  Thanks to the immediacy of the Internet, and the need to post online right at the final horn, every sportswriter has countless tales like that one—when you just want to crumple up your laptop screen and toss it over your shoulder into a little metal trash can in the corner of the room. And, of course, the stories you never get to tell are often so much better than the ones you do get to tell. At least, it feels that way. So much glorious copy left on the cutting-room floor.

  In a way, that’s what appealed to me so much about writing this book. I hopped on the Blackhawks beat when the 2012–13 lockout ended, coming straight from a season covering Notre Dame. In fact, from September of 2012 until March of 2013, I covered 39 regular-season football, basketball, and hockey games. Not a single one of them was a regulation loss for the teams I covered: 36–0–3, in all. It was a heck of a run, and a heck of a lot of fun. And the lockout season was a blast, a wild sprint to the finish line. Then all the way to overtime of Game 7 of the Western Conference final a year later. Then another Cup run the following season. I was fortunate—exhausted, but fortunate—to cover so many high-profile, exciting games in such a short amount of time.

  But I got in when the getting was already good. I walked into a primo gig. I wasn’t there at the start.

  When the Blackhawks were transforming from arguably the worst franchise in professional sports to arguably the best, I was ­covering mid-major college basketball and high school sports as the sports editor of the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana. I watched it all from afar, as a curious hockey fan. I never got to tell those stories.

  This book gave me the chance to do that. And after dozens of hours of interviews with some of the most colorful characters of those late-2000s Blackhawks teams, I realize now that I missed out. What a fun, crazy-ass group that must have been. A far cry from the very nice, very polite, but very vanilla Blackhawks rooms of recent vintage. Maturity and poise and class aren’t quite as fun to cover as youthful Bacchanalia. What’s good for John McDonough isn’t always what’s good for the beat writers.

  So my thanks to all the players, past and present—more than two dozen in total—who were gracious with their time and spoke with me for this book. One thing I noticed: everyone had their guard up early in the interviews, a
s they typically do when a newspaper reporter starts asking questions about any topic. But once they started talking about the good ol’ days, they couldn’t stop. The affection everyone has for that 2010 team is genuine, and it’s palpable.

  Special thanks to Denis Savard for his time, his stories, and his words that prefaced this tale. Nobody bleeds Blackhawks red quite like Savy—he’s been a part of the fabric of this franchise long before the dark ages, throughout the dark ages, and now for the golden age.

  Thanks to Adam Rogowin and John Steinmiller of the Blackhawks media-relations staff for helping me track down former players, and buttonhole current players whenever possible. They were supportive and helpful throughout the process, and I’m sure they’ll both be very happy that I can stop bugging them for the book, and can go back to only bugging them for the paper.

  Thanks to my editors at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Kirk and Chris de Luca, for allowing me to pursue this project during my downtime on the beat, and trusting that it wouldn’t affect my day-to-day ­coverage of the team. Funny thing about this job—it’s a lot of 100-hour weeks, but a lot of those hours are all about killing time. Probably three-quarters of this book was written in Marriotts, at United Clubs, and on United planes.

  Thanks to Bill Ames and Adam Motin of Triumph Books for ­contacting me out of the blue and handing me such a great ­opportunity. I’d always wanted to write a book, but the task of ­coming up with an idea and then pitching it to a publisher always seemed daunting. Bill saved me the trouble, and Adam helped me expedite the process.