Chicago Blackhawks: Stories from the Chicago Blackhawks' Ice, Locker Room, and Press Box

by Mark Lazerus

  Nowhere was the mental disparity more apparent than in the middle two rounds, against Minnesota and Anaheim. The Wild spent the ramp-up to the series talking a big game, saying how things were different now, how they were different now, how they weren’t intimidated by the big bad Blackhawks, who had eliminated them from the playoffs each of the previous two seasons. But their determination reeked of desperation, as if they were trying to convince ­themselves that was the case, not the Blackhawks.

  The series was tighter than the sweep indicated, but the Wild were still no match.

  The Blackhawks then had nine whopping days off between the second and third rounds. Toews recalls a conversation he had with Patrick Sharp during that interminable interregnum.

  “If we get through Anaheim, we’re going to get No. 3 here,” he told Sharp.

  It was a wild series full of momentum shifts and head games. The Ducks won Game 1 at Honda Center handily. Game 2 was an all-time classic, a triple-overtime thriller that seemed to end a dozen times—posts and robberies and missed chances and even Andrew Shaw’s brilliant-but-disallowed, soccer-style headbutt goal. Finally, Marcus Kruger, the unlikeliest hero, scored off a rebound from Brent Seabrook, the perennial overtime hero, more than 16 minutes into the third overtime. It was the longest game in franchise history. And one of the greatest, too.

  Anaheim won Game 3, Chicago won Game 4—this time in double-overtime on a game-winner from Vermette, fresh off Quenneville’s benching. The Blackhawks had become the first team to win four multiple-overtime games in the same postseason.

  Then the mind games started. The physical Ducks insisted that they could wear down the skilled Blackhawks over the course of the series. And they had good reason to believe that. The Blackhawks were basically playing four defensemen, with Duncan Keith, Niklas Hjalmarsson, Johnny Oduya, and Seabrook logging ridiculous ­minutes. All four played at least 46 minutes in Game 2, with Keith playing 49:51. Keith broke the 40-minute mark again in Game 4. And Anaheim was making each minute count, doling out 71 hits in Game 2 and 60 in Game 4.

  Ryan Kesler, a longtime nemesis of the Blackhawks from his days in Vancouver, was convinced the Ducks’ strategy would pay off. Either that, or he was trying to convince himself, just as Minnesota had tried two weeks earlier.

  “No human can withstand that many hits,” he said, in a quote that would go down in the annals of Blackhawks history, to be mocked for all time.

  Thing is, the Blackhawks weren’t exactly human. They were unkillable hockey zombies from Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau’s own personal hell. And oddly enough, the series turned on a Ducks victory.

  Anaheim was less than two minutes away from taking a 3–2 series lead in Game 5 at the Honda Center. Then Toews broke Frederik Andersen.

  Andersen, who had been brilliant through the first two and a half rounds, was left shell-shocked by one of Toews’ signature moments. Toews scored twice in the final 1:50 to send the game to overtime, stunning the home crowd. The Ducks won the game on the first shift of overtime, as Matt Beleskey beat Corey Crawford 45 seconds in. It had to be that fast, too, because one shot on goal on the shaken Andersen might have been all it took. The Ducks had the victory and the series lead. But the Blackhawks had crawled inside their heads, especially their netminder’s.

  Despite Anaheim’s series lead, the Blackhawks’ victories in Game 6 and 7—comfortable wins by 5–2 and 5–3 scores, including a pair of Toews first-period goals to immediately kill the crowd in Anaheim during Game 7—seemed like a foregone conclusion. That’s what the Blackhawks do. That’s what experience does.

  “When it’s that close in a series, I think our experience is the thing we were kind of holding on to,” Toews said. “It’s the same ­feeling we had in the Detroit series [in 2013], or against Nashville. If you’ve never won before, if you’re Anaheim and this is your chance to win, there’s that hidden pressure. It feels like there’s always going to be those doubters there. You could be a great player on that team, but if you haven’t won, people are always going to wonder, ‘What’s he really got?’ For us, it works to our advantage to have won before and to know that when we get into those tough moments late, or in overtime games, we know we can just hang in there and use our patience, use our experience, and use that calmness to find a way. That was our weapon in that series. No matter what kind of abuse we were taking, no matter what kind of onslaught we had to go through, especially on the road, we knew we could just hang in there and find a way to win. To score two late goals like that in Game 5 just ­reassured us that it didn’t matter what they did, we were going to hang on and make things really tough on them. It’s a hard thing to win a fourth game against a team that you know just won’t go down, that just won’t quit. That’s what we showed in that series.”

  The Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning was another series fraught with tension, with neither team able to wrest control of the series away from the other. The Blackhawks fell down 1–0 and 2–1 in the series, but evened it up each time. Vermette’s ­winner in Game 5 at Amalie Arena set the stage for the Blackhawks’ first home championship since 1938, when they were the Chicago Black Hawks and there were just eight teams in the league. Duncan Keith made it 1–0 late in the second, and after Patrick Kane made it 2–0 with 5:14 to go in the game, the Stanley Cup got hung up in traffic. The players caught wind of the Cup’s odyssey, but were too busy reveling in the deafening roar of 22,424 giddy fans to care.

  When it ended, and the sticks were dropped and the gloves were thrown and the dogpile commenced, the building shook. For Keith and Kane and Toews and Seabrook and Marian Hossa and Patrick Sharp and Niklas Hjalmarsson, the third time was sweet as ever. For Crawford, a second Cup was validation. For Kris Versteeg, the ­second time proved you can go home again, at least for a little while. For grizzled veteran Brad Richards, a second Cup was a career capstone. For 40-year-old Kimmo Timonen, who was on the ice in a Flyers uniform when Kane scored the Cup-winner in Philadelphia five years earlier, it was utter jubilation. For spoiled youngsters such as Brandon Saad and Marcus Kruger and Andrew Shaw, it was more of the same. And for first-timers Teuvo Teravainen and Trevor van Riemsdyk and Scott Darling, among others, it was the culmination of everything they had worked for since they were children.

  There would be another Cup crawl. There would be another parade. There would be another summer of love. But there was no rush on this night. The celebration was on, and nobody wanted to leave.

  “It was unreal,” Toews says. “I just wish I could freeze that moment. I just couldn’t believe it had happened once again. Having done it before, you want to enjoy every single second of it, because you know it’s going to slip away much too fast. It was the best celebration, for sure. It was wild. We had nowhere to be. And we tore the roof off.”

  After waiting for nearly 80 years, the Blackhawks and their fans finally celebrated a Stanley Cup victory on home ice in Chicago, in 2015. (Newscom)

  Stranger in a Strange Land

  The first thing Artemi Panarin did when he landed in America was look for a bit of home. Andrew Aksyonov was waiting at O’Hare International Airport to pick up Panarin. The two had never met, but were put in touch by mutual friends from Panarin’s Kontinental Hockey League team, SKA St. Petersburg. Aksyonov agreed to be something of a chaperone for Panarin for his first couple of weeks in Chicago, at least until Panarin’s buddy and new Blackhawks teammate Viktor Tikhonov—a Bay Area native who spoke fluent Russian and English—got to town.

  But Panarin didn’t know what Aksyonov looked like. And Aksyonov didn’t know what Panarin looked like. So over the phone, Panarin told him to look for a guy with hockey sticks. And Aksyonov told Panarin to look for a guy in a SKA St. Petersburg shirt. Okay, so it’s not quite a red rose on the lapel, but it did the trick.

  “That was how we met,” Aksyonov says. “And we hit it off.”

  Aksyonov and his wife, Yulia Mikhaylova, too
k Panarin into their home. They showed him around Chicago. They told him where to get groceries. They helped him get an apartment. Mikhaylova took him to a high-end shop where he could get his dress shoes repaired.

  It was supposed to be for a couple of weeks. But when Tikhonov got to America, Panarin continued to hang out with Aksyonov and Mikhaylova. Eventually, Panarin became godfather to their two ­children, and Panarin even took Aksyonov along on the team’s “dads trip” in January of 2017.

  “It just turned out that way, that I didn’t have a father in my life, because my parents divorced early on,” Panarin says through an ­interpreter. “I didn’t have a father to take with me, so I took a friend.”

  In Panarin, Aksyonov, 38 at the time, saw a younger version of himself. He arrived in the States as a 17-year-old exchange student from St. Petersburg, and he ended up in Omaha, Nebraska. He looked around at the smallish city and the vast nothingness that ­surrounded it and was a little shocked. And a little disappointed.

  Pop culture, it seemed, had let him down.

  “It was not what I expected, because my idea of America was ­skyscrapers and, from watching movies, guys riding Harleys,” Aksyonov says. “And Nebraska was different.”

  Aksyonov spoke some English, but he still was overwhelmed by the transition from Russia to America. Everything was confusing and confounding, and nothing came easy for him. Panarin, meanwhile, was dropped into a massive metropolis without speaking a lick of English. He was older than Aksyonov had been, at 24, but he was lonely. Homesick. Just trying to get by as a stranger in a strange land.

  But he had one thing Aksyonov didn’t have—Aksyonov.

  “I think it was hard for him,” Aksyonov says. “No matter how great the city is, if you’re there by yourself with no one to go to, just as a human being, it’s lonely. Nobody likes that. So we tried to be that little bit of comfort that he could have, that little bit of home. We told him that hey, our door’s always open—anytime you need something, give us a call. It worked out great.”

  Panarin downplays the culture shock, and says he was toughened up by a nomadic childhood. His parents divorced when he was young, and his grandparents did the best they could to nurture his obvious talent for hockey. That meant incredible sacrifices—5:00 am wakeup calls every day to drive an hour each way to practice, and the financial burden that comes with youth hockey. So when he was 10, Panarin was sent to live in a newly constructed sports-centric prep school in Chelyabinsk, an hour away from his hometown of Korkino and the only family he had left.

  So when you’ve left home at the age of five, then left again at age 10, moving to a new country at 24 doesn’t seem so daunting.

  “I felt pretty comfortable from the start, from the get-go,” he says. “My life turned out in such a way that from the age of about 10, I was living on my own. So there aren’t any places where I’m not ­comfortable. I was good from the start.”

  But Aksyonov and Mikhaylova certainly eased the transition, and Panarin was glad to have them in his life. Aksyonov even took on a professional role, serving as an occasional interpreter for Panarin ­during media sessions in Chicago, Las Vegas, and on the road during that dads trip to Denver and Boston.

  Tikhonov’s stay in Chicago was short, but memorable. Before he was claimed on waivers by the Arizona Coyotes—the team that had drafted him in the first round in 2008—on December 6, he and Panarin had emerged as the Russian Laurel and Hardy of the Blackhawks dressing room. Tikhonov served as friend and interpreter, and the two had clearly built up a great rapport as teammates in St. Petersburg. Their press scrums were must-see events, with Tikhonov explaining jokes and idioms that were lost in translation, and Panarin—who was taking English lessons via Skype—shooting Tikhonov mock dirty looks whenever he got something wrong.

  Their most memorable such scrum came in Brooklyn, ­during the first week of the regular season. The two were doing their usual Vaudeville act following the morning skate at Barclays Center. Through Tikhonov, Panarin cracked jokes about Patrick Kane ­telling him the most important thing—“pass to No. 88”; about how he wants to chime in during locker-room conversations but can’t quite articulate his thoughts; and about how Artem Anisimov has to play the middleman when Joel Quenneville is screaming on the bench, whether it’s instructive or vitriolic.

  Then, a simple question.

  “What’s your favorite English term you’ve picked up so far?”

  Panarin smiled. “What the fuck,” he said with a mischievous grin. No interpreter needed.

  Tikhonov tried to do some damage control—“You probably shouldn’t run that.” Of course, it was all over Twitter in a matter of ­seconds.

  But Tikhonov, signed as much for his friendship with Panarin as his own considerable talent, became, for lack of a better word, expendable because Panarin so quickly adjusted to life in Chicago. And it was Aksyonov and Mikhaylova who made that happen. After his first season in Chicago, they all even hung out together back in St. Petersburg in the summer—Panarin now taking Aksyonov and Mikhaylova into his home.

  He never had much of a family in Russia, but he found one in Chicago.

  “I’m very happy it turned out that way,” Panarin says. “They’re certainly very nice people and provide that comfort away from home, and we became quite good friends over that time.”

  A trade to Columbus in June of 2017 meant Panarin would have to start over again in a new city. But after two years in Chicago, and two years with Aksyonov and Mikhaylova, he’s much more ­comfortable, much more capable, and much more confident.

  The trade was a disappointment for Aksyonov and Mikhaylova, too. Besides seeing a close friend leave the city, they lost their link to the team. The perks for Panarin were obvious—family, friendship, a home away from home. For Aksyonov and Mikhaylova, the perks were a little more tangible.

  “I view myself as a friend, that’s all,” Aksyonov says. “The team, and the access, and the interesting things I get to do is just the bonus. But it’s a very, very cool bonus, because we are also huge fans. We already were big Blackhawks fans; we watched every game. But it’s different when somebody you know is playing on the team. The level of emotion just goes up a notch. You learn so much about the game, so much about the effort those guys are putting in day in, day out. It’s just eye-opening.”

  Back in St. Petersburg, when they were dating, Aksyonov and Mikhaylova had some connections to SKA—they had mutual friends with Blackhawks director of player development Barry Smith, the onetime coach of SKA, which is how they were hooked up with Panarin in the first place—and were occasionally offered free tickets.

  “Wow, this is so cool,” Aksyonov told Mikhaylova once when they were snuck in through the back door of the arena to see a game. “Wouldn’t it be cool to have that sort of thing in Chicago?”

  Now, Aksyonov laughs at the memory.

  “Wow,” he says. “Careful what you wish for, huh?”

  Yulia Mikhaylova and Andrew Aksyonov provided Blackhawks rookie Artemi Panarin (center) with a home away from home after the Russian sensation landed in Chicago. (Newscom)

  Blackhawks Legend Eric Semborski

  The first thing they noticed was his clothes. Eric Semborski—a 23-year-old Philadelphia-area youth hockey coach who played club hockey at Temple University but hadn’t played a competitive hockey game in more than a year—nervously walked into the Blackhawks dressing room at Wells Fargo Center in jeans and a T-shirt. That’s a clear violation of team policy, which requires players to dress the part, especially on the road.

  “He had no suit on,” Niklas Hjalmarsson says.

  On top of that, he was late, strolling into the room some 45 ­minutes before puck drop. Sure, he had a pretty good excuse—the guy was at work at a Voorhees, New Jersey, ice rink when he was told to go home, grab his gear, and be a Blackhawk for a day—but rules are rules.

  “They put my num
ber on the board and said I was throwing in $200 for the holiday party,” Semborski says. “I told them, ‘You’d better take credit, because that’s all I’ve got.’”

  And just like that, a legend was born, and a locker room was lifted. The Blackhawks had spent their morning worried about their friend and backbone, Corey Crawford, who had been taken to a local ­hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Scott Darling was suddenly starting the matinee against the Flyers, and there was nobody to back him up.

  The obvious choice was Jimmy Waite, the 47-year-old former No. 1 draft pick and current goalie coach. But thanks to the quirks of the NHL rule book, Waite, as a former professional, would count against the Blackhawks’ salary cap, something the team couldn’t afford. So the Flyers put them in touch with Semborski, who works with the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation and runs local Dek Hockey leagues. After more than an hour in traffic, Semborski was in the Blackhawks dressing room, Crawford’s too-big No. 50 jersey hanging in a locker stall, the nameplate removed and replaced with SEMBORSKI.

  The kid’s arrival buoyed a concerned roster.

  “It’s tough, because you’re worried about Crow,” Darling says. “You don’t know what’s wrong, you don’t know if it’s minor or major. They don’t tell us, just like they don’t tell [reporters]. When Eric showed up, we rallied around that. It kind of got the guys going and excited.”

  Says Hjalmarsson: “It was fun to see how happy Eric was when he came in here, and you kind of relived your own first game in the NHL. You saw the smile on his face and how happy he was and it gave all the other guys in the locker room more energy. It was fun. A new experience. But I think we all had fun with it, considering the circumstances with Crow.”