by Mark Lazerus
But there’s one favorite saying of Quenneville’s that is as blunt and as honest as it gets:
“We’re in the winning business.”
And midway through the 2011–12 season, the Blackhawks weren’t winning. At all. The annual ice-show trip, when Disney on Ice kicks the team out of the United Center for a couple of weeks, can often be a fun, spirited trip full of rowdy nights on the road and Mario Kart tournaments in the hotel. And the Blackhawks entered the 2012 edition atop the Western Conference, one point ahead of division rival Detroit.
But after Nashville swept a home-and-home series heading into the All-Star break, the trip turned into an endless death march of inexplicable losses. Nine of them in a row, all told.
“We weren’t used to that,” Dave Bolland says. “That was the one time in my Chicago career that we were just lost, looking around like, ‘Jeez, what’s going on here?’ It’s never fun losing. But I’d never dealt with anything of that length.”
A blown lead in Vancouver turned into an overtime loss against the hated Canucks, with the Sedin twins combining on the game-winner with nemesis Bolland on the ice. Next came a humiliating 8–4 loss in Edmonton, with Sam Gagner of all people putting up an unthinkable eight points, with four goals and four assists. A lousy effort in a 3–1 loss in Calgary followed. Then a 5–2 loss in Colorado. A 5–3 loss in San Jose. A particularly frustrating 3–0 loss in Phoenix, with Mike Smith making 38 stops. And finally a late-goal loss against Nashville, the third time the Predators beat them during the skid.
They started the streak in first place in the conference. They ended it in sixth, 15 points behind Detroit and only three points up on ninth-place Calgary.
Jonathan Toews, the 23-year-old captain, dutifully stood at his stall after each loss, awaiting the onslaught of questions for which he had no answers. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the skid. They lost with good goaltending. They lost while outshooting the other team. They lost high-scoring games. They lost low-scoring games. The only common thread was that the Blackhawks were always on the losing end.
And Toews’ frustration only mounted with each loss, his answers getting more clipped and biting.
“I’d probably handle it differently now,” Toews says. “Hopefully, I’ll never have to go through a long losing streak like that again, because it’s easy to say you’d do things differently, but harder to actually do it. It was pretty depressing.”
Being on the road made it that much worse.
“If you lose one back home, you can sort of get back up because you know you’re going to be in your home building, you know you’ve got your crowd behind you,” Bolland says. “When you’re on the road, it’s a grind, and you go from one city to the next. You wake up and you’re not in your own bed, and you’re still pretty much out of it because you just lost a game, you’re getting in about 1:00 or 2:00 am, and some guys don’t even go to bed until 3:00 or 4:00 because your adrenaline is still pumping and you’re still pissed about what happened the night before. So sometimes on the road, you have to go out for a few beers to shut the mind off of hockey and just try to find some little bit of fun. Because it’s a grind, especially when you’re losing.”
There was significant discord between management and the coaching staff, and a power struggle ensued between Quenneville and Bowman. Shortly after the road trip from hell, director of player development Barry Smith started appearing on the ice during Blackhawks practices, working with the anemic power play.
Multiple sources said that decision came from Stan and Scotty Bowman, not from Quenneville. And Quenneville was furious about it, angrily confronting Stan Bowman about it behind closed doors. Smith was in constant communication with Bowman about what was happening on the ice, and Quenneville strongly resented his presence.
But as Quenneville knows all too well, it’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world. And the images of that magical 2010 Stanley Cup run etched into everyone’s memories were starting to yellow around the edges. According to multiple people within the organization, there was serious internal discussion about firing Quenneville—discussions that continued into the off-season after the Blackhawks lost to the Phoenix Coyotes in the first round of the playoffs, their second straight early playoff exit.
At the height—well, the depth—of the losing streak, the rumblings had reached even the inner sanctum of the dressing room.
“That was one of the things I learned as a captain, is to pay attention to a lot of those extracurricular things that go on in an organization, and in the media, and in the city,” Toews says. “No doubt, the players were aware of the pressure on both us and the coaching staff. We’ve come a long way since then, but that was a low point. You win the Stanley Cup and you think the team will be together forever, but then you have to start over from scratch like we did, and it was tough.”
Toews has since dealt with different individual adversity, whether it was his 2013 meltdown against Detroit, or his dismal start to the 2016–17 season. With those experiences, he learned perspective, and how to handle himself when things go wrong. When the goals aren’t going in, he tries to zero in on the little things—create a good scoring chance, make a nice defensive play, block a shot, tee up someone else’s goal—to give him some sort of good feeling, some level of confidence to break through.
But that perspective comes with age. And for all Toews had accomplished by that point, the mounting losses and the mounting pressure and the mounting buzz about his coach’s fate weighed on him.
“When you’re on a losing streak, you get down and you feel there’s a certain way you need to act—you need to go out there and look mad, and act disappointed,” Toews says. “But really, what you need to do is simplify and enjoy the game again. Get back to that place where you’re having fun, even if there’s no outward result or reason to be happy or to be excited. You’ve got to start from within. It’s one of those things that going through that experience teaches you.”
The breakthrough came on the second-to-last day of the nine-game trip, a soul-soothing 4–2 win over the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden. Just 65 seconds into the game, with the Rangers starting backup Martin Biron over the red-hot Henrik Lundqvist, Toews scored on a penalty shot. Nick Leddy scored 62 seconds after that. Patrick Sharp scored 1:53 after that. And Marian Hossa scored 5:38 after that. Halfway into the first period, the Blackhawks were up 4–0, and they coasted to victory.
“We haven’t had too many regular-season wins that felt as good as that,” Quenneville said afterward.
Toews said he felt enormous pressure on that penalty shot in order to give his teammates some sort of life. And he was right.
“Even playing soccer before that game at Madison Square Garden, the mood of the team was not very good,” Sharp says. “That was the worst losing streak that I’d been a part of with the Blackhawks, and that includes some of those bad years early on. We needed that game bad. It just put everything back on track.”
The Blackhawks spun that game into a four-game win streak to steady themselves in the playoff race. Defenseman Johnny Oduya’s arrival at the trade deadline provided a lift, but the season ended abruptly for the second straight season, with a six-game loss to the Coyotes. Three of those losses came in overtime. But the clincher was a dismal 4–0 defeat, sending the Blackhawks into an uncertain off-season. Nine days after the season ended, Quenneville lost an ally in the front office when the Montreal Canadiens hired assistant general manager Marc Bergevin to be their new GM. Less than a week later, Bowman lost an ally on the coaching staff when Quenneville fired assistant coach Mike Haviland—a move that was quite overtly Quenneville taking a stand that this was his team.
But the threat of a lockout loomed large. Quenneville’s job was up in the air, at best. So was Bowman’s, who had taken Dale Tallon’s core and failed to come up with the right pieces to fill in the gaps around it. The Blackhawks wer
e looking like one-year wonders, a pretty good team that spiked a championship early on before settling back into the middle of the pack.
“At that point, I don’t know if we were thinking too much about Joel, but maybe the whole team,” Patrick Kane says. “What’s going to happen? Are they going to blow up the team? Are they going to make a bunch of changes? To Stan’s credit, he kept that group together. It was kind of the same group heading into the next season with the lockout. I don’t know if he sensed something special or thought we could rebound, but obviously we got off to a great start to that next season. It was cool how he kept that group together. Sometimes you see teams lose and GMs and coaches just want to make all these changes. They just kind of let us figure it out as a team, and it ended up working out.”
“That was a rough time in my career, but you kind of grow with that, too, and you can learn from that kind of stuff,” Niklas Hjalmarsson says. “It’s always easy to be positive and have fun and play hard when things are going great. But it’s when things start to get rocky, that’s when you show some real character and you see who’s going to be a team player. When things are not going your way, you learn a lot about the character in the locker room. I think in the long run, that stretch was good for us.”
Sure, easy to say now. But at the time, nobody could foresee the dominant run that would follow—two Stanley Cups and 10 playoff series victories in the next three years—and nobody was even sure who would be behind the bench. Eventually, upper management decided to give Quenneville another year to make things right.
“In this business, you can’t worry about any of that stuff,” Quenneville said of the speculation. “I feel fortunate to be in Chicago.”
4. 2013: The Sprint Cup
The Lockout
Jonathan Toews has been training his whole life to be the multiple Stanley Cup–winning captain of an NHL team. It’s all he ever wanted or planned to be. As a little kid, he’d be doing pullups while other kids were watching cartoons. He’d be on the ice while other kids were sleeping in. He’s an NHL player. It’s ingrained in his entire sense of self, etched into his DNA.
And then, all of a sudden, in the fall of 2012, he wasn’t. Nobody was.
“Suddenly, there’s all this uncertainty,” Toews says. “And at least for me, I don’t know if I would call it an identity crisis, but it definitely makes you think of who you are, and what you’ve got going for yourself if not for hockey. I started to think about what my life would be like if we missed another season, or two, or however long this thing might drag on. It wasn’t a great feeling.”
“This thing,” of course, was the NHL’s third lockout in 18 years. The 1994–95 lockout wiped out half a season. The 2004–05 lockout erased an entire season. And nobody knew what the fate would be for the 2012–13 season. Many players stayed home. Prospects and fringe players toiled in the American Hockey League. Dozens of players went to Europe to play—Patrick Kane, Henrik Zetterberg, John Tavares, and Patrice Bergeron to Switzerland; Jaromir Jagr and Tuukka Rask to the Czech Republic; Viktor Stalberg and Matt Duchene to Sweden; Pavel Datsyuk, Evgeni Malkin, and Alex Ovechkin to Russia; Erik Karlsson and Frans Nielsen to Finland; Claude Giroux and Wayne Simmonds to Germany.
Hell, Johnny Oduya played—and won—a glorified beer-league tournament in Bangkok while on vacation.
“They look at you funny when you get on the plane on Thai Airways with hockey sticks—they’ve never seen that,” Oduya says. “They’re like, ‘It’s not golf. It’s sticks, but I don’t really know what it is.’ So it was actually pretty funny.”
Kane thoroughly enjoyed his stint in Switzerland, even as he thumbed through Don Fehr’s and the NHLPA’s daily updates on the lockout each morning. It was an opportunity to get away from the scrutiny he faced after his Cinco de Mayo escapades in Madison, Wisconsin, and to get his personal and professional life back in order. He got to play alongside Tyler Seguin. He got to play a different style of hockey. He even got to play in the Spengler Cup, a nearly 100-year-old Swiss invitational tournament that saw him play five games in five days for the first time in forever.
“I remember stretching before the fifth game, and I was just like, ‘Maybe I’ll get through this somehow,’” Kane says.
His favorite memory of the lockout? Christmas dinner with his girlfriend. While the rest of the country was with their families, they had the entire hotel restaurant to themselves.
“It was pretty cool,” Kane says. “A fun experience.”
For the guys who stuck around Chicago, waiting and watching and hoping for some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t all that fun. Toews did what Toews does and became the de facto head coach of a motley crew of present Blackhawks, former Blackhawks, and future Blackhawks. Without a director of team services, Toews had to call up the team’s usual practice facility at Johnny’s IceHouse West and reserve ice time. Without Rocky Wirtz’s deep pockets, Toews had to wrangle $10 or $20 from every player to pay for it. Without Joel Quenneville, Toews had to draw up drills on a dry-erase board. Without assistant coaches, veteran forward Jamal Mayers grabbed a whistle.
Among the group were well-known players such as Patrick Sharp, Dave Bolland, Marcus Kruger, Niklas Hjalmarsson, Sheldon Brookbank, and Oduya. Prospects such as Brandon Pirri, Ben Smith, Jeremy Morin, and Adam Clendening joined in, too. And former Blackhawks Brian Campbell, Ben Eager, and Troy Brouwer, who spent their off-seasons in Chicago, joined them.
It originally started as a Monday-Wednesday-Friday enterprise, but it quickly became apparent that talks between the league and the players association were going nowhere slowly, so on-ice workouts were only occasional. Instead, they spent much of their time in the gym, trying to push each other to prepare for a season that might never come.
Toews got frequent updates from the team’s player rep, Steve Montador, and relayed them to the group.
“Nobody was there to help us out. It was weird,” Bolland says. “We’d come in some days, and Tazer would be like, ‘Okay, they’re not talking for another three weeks,’ and guys would just take their gear off, and wouldn’t even go on the ice sometimes. They’d just go right to the gym and get in as much gym work as they could. Every time we’d come in, it would be like, ‘Hey, what are we doing? Are we going on the ice today or are we waiting another three or four weeks for them to talk?’ We were just always waiting.”
For NHL players, whose lives are so regimented and whose needs are so catered to at all times during the season, it was jarring. And unnerving.
“It’s not a strict schedule that you’re used to every fall,” Toews says. “We’d hear a few whispers that talks might be picking up, and we’d kick it into high gear on the ice. Then you’d hear they’re putting it off for another day, and you taper off what you’re doing on the ice. It was tough. But it was good to have a group like that out there, especially for the guys who decided not to play in Europe.”
And it worked. By the time the lockout ended, shortly after New Year’s Day, and news came of a four-day training camp leading into a ridiculous sprint season of 48 games in 99 days, the Blackhawks felt ready. Well, at least more ready than most.
“It was kind of scary,” Sharp says. “Because if you just disappear for a little while, then you might be losing ground on other teams. I remember calling around to other guys on other teams to try to get an idea of what they were doing during the lockout. They were just going on the ice by themselves, or with two, three, or four guys, just passing pucks around. We would have eight to 15 guys every time we were on the ice, and we’re doing drills and conditioning. When you look back at how we started the season, with that 24-game streak, I think there’s a reason we were able to do that. We must have been training harder, we must have been preparing harder than other teams, right? I mean, who knows, but it felt that way.”
For 24 of the most improbable and unforgettable games in team history, it sure looked
that way, too.
The Streak
Twenty-one games in, when the streak had sailed past “epic proportions” and blown by “historic proportions” and steamrolled into “ridiculous proportions;” when the national media had started taking notice; when the press box and dressing room at the United Center were packed with playoff-level press hordes; when the Blackhawks had pulled out victories in every way imaginable—last-second goals, highway-robbery goaltending, laughable blowouts, breathtaking track meets—a reporter asked Brent Seabrook if he had any new thoughts on what was now known as The Streak, proper name.
Seabrook thought about it for a moment. Scrunched his face up. Searched his brain.
“Nah.”
At some point, you run out of adjectives.
A Sports Illustrated cover that came out just after the Blackhawks’ record 21–0–3 start—literally half the season without losing a game during actual hockey play, just three shootouts—proclaimed the Blackhawks “The Franchise That Brought Hockey Back” in the wake of the lockout that pushed the start of the season into late January and compressed a 48-game season into a whirlwind 99 days. It was hyperbolic and a little silly—one Blackhawks player snidely said, “The fucking sport didn’t need saving”—but the amazing run to open the season changed the narrative from collective-bargaining to collective ass-kicking.
The highlights were endless. Four games in, the Blackhawks erased a 2–0 second-period deficit to beat Dallas on a Marian Hossa one-timer in overtime.
Nine games in, Ray Emery had one of the greatest individual goaltending performances in Blackhawks history, making 47 saves and stopping all three Calgary Flames in the shootout at the Saddledome, allowing the Blackhawks to escape with two points after Hossa scored with less than three seconds left in regulation. Emery made 22 saves in the third period alone, many of them spectacular, or in his words, “scrambly.”