Chicago Sports Then and Now

As the team captain, Jonathan Toews provides important leadership for the Blackhawks.

Blackhawks fans may have felt an equal measure of relief and trepidation when the team held a press conference December 3rd to announce that Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith had been secured for the next five years, and in Keith’s case, for thirteen years, presumably the balance of his career.

Relief, because their star center and Captain Toews, and flashy winger Kane, just 21 years old, are considered the driving forces of the Hawks; while Keith, at 26, is already seen as a Norris Trophy candidate defenseman, and plays more minutes than anyone on the squad.

Trepidation, because the questions about how the Hawks address the impact of these signings on their management of the salary cap loom larger than ever.

In effect, by ‘locking up their core’, as the jargon goes, the Blackhawks were doing what their longest-standing and most hated rivals, the Detroit Red Wings, had done before them, in signing their own stars to long term—in some cases, unprecedented—deals.

Toews and Kane are to the Hawks what forwards Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk are to the Wings. Keith is arguably the Hawks’ equivalent of multiple Norris winner Nicklas Lidström. Taking the parallel further, the signing of power forward Marian Hossa becomes the Blackhawks’ answer to Johan Franzen.

Former Wings guru, the man who has won more Stanley Cups as a hockey executive than anyone, William ‘Scotty Bowman’ has brought more than a little bit of Detroit’s organizational DNA with him to Chicago as Special Advisor Hockey Operations. His son, Stanley Glenn Bowman (named for the Stanley Cup and Cup Champion Hawk goalie Glenn Hall) is a Notre Dame finance and computer science Master whose life has been spent absorbing the father’s hockey expertise and applying it during his own rise to the top within the Chicago organization, culminating in his promotion from Assistant GM to General Manager in July 2009.

The reasoning for, and term of, the contracts for these three Hawks should not, then, come as a surprise.

But what is most significant about these signings, is that they represent the future of NHL hockey in the age of the salary cap.

Only 21-years-old, Patrick Kane could have a long future with the Blackhawks.

The cap was put in place after the 2004-05 NHL lockout, it was said, intended to create a level playing field while holding down the escalation of player salaries.

Nothing of the sort has occurred.

Elite forwards are now paid as much a nine million dollars a year; top defensemen command six and seven; and goaltenders are matching that number. The only way teams can control their costs, it is now argued, is to sign a small core of players to lengthy, lucrative agreements, and stock the rest of the squad with inexpensive youngsters and value-priced short term veteran talent.

The cap itself has risen dramatically, from an initial figure of $39 million USD to approximately $60 million, including bonus provisions. The NHL Players Association Collective Bargaining Agreement, a two hundred plus page document is a labyrinth of legalese, defying even the most dogged reader to decipher its clauses.

A number of hockey journalists, looking to chop complex issues down to crisp quips and digestible sound bites, have now resorted to the Cliff Notes version. This manifests itself in a barrage of manufactured drama over what is the accountant’s unglamorous job of making the numbers work. Fans are subjected to endless scenarios of speculation. Trades are supposedly ‘must get done’ in order to ‘free up’ room and avert the ongoing ‘cap crisis’—as if General Managers were shackled to their calculators, forced to eat bread and water and staring down the barrel of a gun. The deluge of fan commentary on Internet forums and message boards is enough to drown any human being who tries to swim in it.

The reality, however, is blunt. Hockey is a tough business; and as former GE Chairman Jack Welch once said, “Business is simple.”

The simplicity of W. Rockwell ‘Rocky’ Wirtz’s comments post-signing, underlines that.

“What the fans have got to realize is, if you have the nucleus you can fill in,” the Chairman of the Chicago Blackhawks since 2007, and whose family have owned the team since 1954, said in the Chicago Sun-Times. ”Now, if we let these three go to another team, then the fans would really be nervous.”

Rocky Wirtz and his brain trust have a blueprint for the Blackhawks that extends beyond the ice surface.

As Forbes noted in its October 2009 report, “The Business of Hockey”, the successful re-launch of the Chicago Blackhawks franchise is attributed not only to the rapid overhaul of the hockey team, but the all-encompassing marketing apparatus. The franchise leapt in value by 26 per cent over the previous year to $287 million, making it the NHL’s 7th most valuable.

Team President John McDonough, brought aboard by Wirtz in 2008, and who formerly worked marketing magic for baseball’s Cubs, has garnered much of the credit.

Management has been aggressively driven to mix pricey—some say overpriced—free agent talent with that developed within the system. The dollars have flowed, and the limits of the salary cap have been tested.

But the results have been unequivocal: a meteoric rise in the standings, ongoing sellouts and growing retail uptrend of Blackhawks merchandise.

With Toews, Kane and Keith now aboard long term, selling them to the hard-core hockey public and the new fan, can be ramped up full bore. Their marquee names in place for at least the next five years, the Hawks have defined their window of opportunity.

Whether purists agree or not, the Blackhawks are one of the most ‘consumable’ of NHL teams. According to surveys by established media like The Hockey News, the Hawks’ Indian Head logo and jersey rank as one of, if not the most, popular in hockey and all of professional sport.

The fresh-faced Toews and Kane are the buddy-buddy pair, one a serious, quiet Canadian from Winnipeg, the other a glib American bad boy from Buffalo. Their potential for endorsement deals is a sports agent’s dream. Of stout Scottish-Canadian stock, Duncan Keith is the blue collar counterpart who plies his trade along the blueline, the epitome of the everyman hockey player.

Already a standout defenseman, Duncan Keith's new contract should keep him with the Blackhawks for the bulk of his career.

Carefully groomed by the PR specialists, the innate charm of the three has now become a smooth blend of on-ice virtuosity and videogenic panache. The image of these bright, level-headed young men heading for the top, projects sophistication in a violent game.

This vision of a glowing future, however, does little to qualm the trepidation of fans who wonder which of their favorites may be obliged to leave Starship Blackhawk as it goes boldly where no team has gone before.

The sound of fingers crunching calculators and the spike in sales of worry beads accompany the chorus of voices who chant “Cup or Bust”.

Knowing the expectations of the Stanley Cup now are foremost in the minds of fans and the media, Toews, Kane and Keith have done their best to temper expectation. Toews and Kane still speak respectfully of their opponents, in particular the Red Wings, who they consider the main obstacle to the Hawks’ Cup aspirations. The collective memory of the reigning Champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and their Finals sweep of Chicago in 1992—the last time the Blackhawks made that round—is not lost on them.

The loyalists have waited since 1961 for another Champion Chicago hockey team. Disraeli’s maxim, “Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius”, does not necessarily resonate with the hockey fan.

All the buttons have been pushed to win now—and anything less than the return of Lord Stanley’s Cup to Chicago in the next few seasons will bear the brunt of fan frustration.

That in mind, the hiring last September of Joel Quenneville, whose 500 career wins confirm his pedigree as one of the league’s top coaches, was intended to impart discipline to what was the circuit’s youngest team. It took Quenneville a full campaign and the shock of a Conference Finals loss to the Red Wings, for his message to fully take hold with the sometimes impetuous players.

Signing premier forward Marian Hossa away from Detroit to a controversial 12-year contract, the Blackhawks were tasked this year with shedding their ‘cardiac kids’ tag and getting down to business. The swagger that once characterized the Blackhawks has given way to maturity and efficiency. The Hawks allow the fewest shots and fewest goals per game of any team in the NHL. Their puck possession skill and ability for almost any player to score at any time has made them, as the powerful San Jose Sharks and Calgary Flames recently discovered in respective 7-2 and 7-1 home ice defeats, one of the deadliest foes in the league.

The job facing General Manager Stan Bowman is, without question, Herculean. Making the pieces fit while balancing the books is complicated by contracts he inherited from his predecessor Dale Tallon. But Bowman appears unruffled—his critics say his demeanor is soporific—as he approaches the next eight months before the team must bring its budget and roster into line with the 2010-11 salary cap.

If the reported numbers of six million per year for Toews and Kane, and four million plus for Keith are correct, estimates maintain the Blackhawks are already committed to $60 million in salary, while the cap, though as yet undetermined for 2010-11, may be about that or less.

So that money covers only 15 players, with a roster of 22 or 23 to fill—and raises to be handed out.

The prognosis by several observers holds that Bowman must find a way to trim between seven and ten million dollars in salary to accommodate those needs.

And so the guessing game begins—who stays, who goes?

Bowman is, at least on the surface, sanguine about the challenge. His remarks, reported by the Chicago dailies, reinforce the confidence he consistently expresses in the assets assembled. “We can play with this team for the rest of the year, and may choose to do that.”

In answer to the sceptics, he preaches calm; while chiding those who chide the Blackhawks for being spendthrifts. “We’re no different than any other team. People fall in love with this team and we do, too, but this is not a phenomenon that just the Blackhawks face. We’re playing under the same rules as Pittsburgh, Detroit and Washington, so when you say we’re going to have tough decisions this summer, that’s correct, but last summer we saw teams let players go.

“I’m sure they weren’t thrilled about it, but those are the rules and we’re all playing under this system. Decisions have to be made and we’ll make the right ones at the right time, but we don’t need to get ahead of ourselves now.

“We’ve been saying all along that we’ll have some work to do in the summer, and we’ll have to make some tough decisions. By the summer we’ll know more. We don’t have the full picture yet.”

One of Bowman’s tenets has been to ensure the development of the team’s prospects and their gradual integration in the Blackhawks’ “system-first” philosophy.

The resemblance to the process perfected by Scotty Bowman and New Jersey Devils General Manager Lamoriello is striking. Just, as there is “Red Wings Hockey” and “Devils Hockey”, there is “Blackhawks Hockey”: a style based on continuous puck possession and attack—with a decided physical edge.

This style evokes the ’61 Champions, the powerhouse clubs of the 60s and 70s, and the hard-nosed teams of the 1980s and early 90s with Denis Savard, Steve Larmer and Doug Wilson—to whom Kane, Toews and Keith have been compared by the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Rosenbloom.

The draft choices made under Dale Tallon have already paid dividends, and the pipeline looks rich. Highly-ranked juniors like defensemen Dylan Olsen and Shawn Lalonde are invited to the Team Canada camp at the World Junior Championships. Minor-league forwards like Bryan Bickell, Jack Skille, Kyle Beach and Akim Aliu are seemingly on the verge of their shot at the big time.

With turnover being inevitable, Blackhawks fans may see these youngsters in the near future.

Rocky Wirtz also appears to have sent a message to fan base: enjoy the ride.

“We’re lucky to have players that want to play for us. Any other team in this league would have taken these players off our hands. They would have no problem doing that.”

In a sense, what the Blackhawks have done is go against the grain. In an age where the hockey player can choose to be a mercenary—and many have—they have offered star athletes, who have traditionally been chattels exchanged like trading cards, a tangible personal and professional stability.

Watching Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith in their press conference, one thing became clear. These young men have been given the opportunity of their lives—and they know it.

Duncan Keith, quoted in the Chicago Daily Herald, said it simply. “It’s great knowing I’m going to be a Blackhawk for the rest of my career.”

“I can’t envision playing anywhere else,” Kane was quoted in The Herald as well.

Captain Jonathan Toews’ perspectives were perhaps the most emotional. “To be blessed to be in this city, I can’t think of any better place to be drafted to when I was 18 years old,” Toews told The Herald. “To me, it’s not about the business side and all that stuff. I’m just happy to know I’m going to be part of this organization for a while longer and hopefully a lot longer after that.”

So what’s next for the Blackhawks? The answer seems clear to them, and their statements in the press conference were identical to a man: “To help this organization win a Championship.”