Since 2007, Chicago Blackhawks center Jonathan Toews was an integral component of his team's success. In this 2012 story from THN's Archive, we examined what it was that made him so serious.
This is the first NHL regular season that hasn’t included Chicago Blackhawks icon Jonathan Toews since 2007, and it doesn’t feel like a complete league without the services of one of the most all-around excellent competitors of Toews’ era.
Toews announced this summer that, although he wasn’t retiring from the game, he was taking time away from the league this season to concentrate on his health. But when he was at his peak, the 35-year-old was one of the key cogs to the Hawks’ three Stanley Cup championships, two Olympic gold medals for Team Canada, and he was also honored with the Frank J. Selke Trophy as the sport’s best defensive forward as well as the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs.
Toews was the prototypical humble NHL star throughout his playing days, often deferring to his teammates when it came time to hand out laurels over Chicago’s dominance. And in this exclusive story from THN’s vast Archive, Toews and his teammates broke down exactly what made him such a special player.
(And always remember, you can get full access to our 76-year archive when you subscribe to the magazine.)
In this article – the cover story from THN’s March 5, 2012 edition (Vol. 65, Issue 19) – this writer spoke to Toews at length about his journey from University of North Dakota star to Blackhawks mainstay. And his singular focus on the win/loss columns put him in heady sporting company, according to those who knew him best.
“He reminds me of (New York Yankees legend) Derek Jeter,” Hawks defenseman Sean O’Donnell said of Toews at the time. “It’s all about winning with him.”
Toews rarely showed emotion in his playing days, approaching good times and bad with equal determination. And despite operating in the pressure cooker that is Chicago pro sports, he did his best to humanize the position he was in and find ways to compartmentalize his focus on his craft as well as his personal time away from the rink.
“We play so many games and you give so much every game you play, so it definitely can be ‘all hockey, all the time,’ ” Toews said in the article. “But that’s one of the things I’ve really learned since I’ve become an NHLer – you have to find ways to get away from hockey and enjoy yourself, whether it’s going out to a restaurant or having a drink with your buddies. You just have to be smart about it. In Chicago, everyone seems to know who we are now. It’s easy for anyone to get in trouble pretty quick, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like to have fun like anyone. We have a young team and we have to be kids every once in a while, too.”
Before he stepped away from his hockey career, Toews had played in 1,067 regular-season games and generated 511 assists and 883 points. He’s a potential Hall of Famer, and the company he kept in his prime included megastar Sidney Crosby. In many ways, Crosby and Toews were cut from the same cloth, with their work ethic and dogged determination setting them apart from the rest.
“The best description I’ve heard about Crosby is he’s an elite player with a fourth-liner’s mentality and I think the same can be said about Johnny,” O’Donnell said of Toews. “There’s a certain gene you can’t teach and he has it. And when you get a combination of a player who has world-class ability, but also has that leadership and focus, he’s not going to be stopped.”
WHY NOT SO SERIOUS?
Vol. 65, Issue 19, March 5, 2012
By Adam Proteau
It should come as no surprise that, even as a kid, Chicago Blackhawks superstar Jonathan Toews was an old soul – and one with a competitive streak as long as the shorelines of Manitoba’s lakes strung end-to-end. When he was running around as a kid playing pickup games on soccer pitches in his native Winnipeg, his father Bryan said, “You would have thought they were playing for the World Cup.”
When he practiced taekwondo, he eventually had to stop because his love for hockey didn’t allow enough time to be as good as he wanted to be in that field. Hell, as soon as Toews exited the womb April 29, 1988, he was probably lying in the hospital’s new arrivals ward, staring down other newborns and mapping out his plan to be the first baby to go home with his parents.
Yes, after four-and-a-half NHL seasons, Toews has learned the value of giving himself a small amount of breathing room outside the game. But don’t fool yourself into thinking his laurels are being rested upon in the slightest. Even now, at 23, after ascending to the pinnacle of the hockey world, he is as driven, as relentless, as consumed with competition as ever.
In the current picture, it doesn’t matter that he won a Stanley Cup and a Conn Smythe Trophy at 21, a World Championship at 19, two world junior gold medals and an Olympic gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Games. When you’re Jonathan Toews, all that stuff is resume fodder – complimentary resume fodder that he’s quite thankful for, mind you, but fodder nonetheless.
When you’re Jonathan Toews, each sunrise is a boxing bell going off, signaling it’s time to begin the next round of the fight. And Toews is in that fight for the long haul. He possesses none of the braggadocio of Muhammad Ali, but a similar ability to strike fear into the hearts and spines of opponents like ‘The Greatest’ did. Like another Great One, Wayne Gretzky, Toews understands it’s not about whether you’ve done it all in hockey, but how many times you’ve done it all.
That’s why he’s nonplussed by the increasing amount of praise coming his way. In fact, when a reporter tells him, with Sidney Crosby’s health struggles and Alex Ovechkin failing to look like the wunderkind he did a few years back and Pavel Datsyuk approaching the back-nine of his Hall-of-Fame career, many believe he is the most complete player in the NHL today and the one most GMs would choose to build a franchise around, Toews shifts into “aw-shucks” mode and says all the right things as he always does. “It’s always fun to hear things like that,” Toews said. “That gives you the incentive to keep working. It’s a confidence-builder, but I still feel like I’ve got a long ways to go before I start earning those comparisons if I want them to be true. As long as our team is doing well, that’s the main thing.”
The Hawks’ collective effort will forever be more important to Toews than his stats or achievements. But just for shifts and giggles, let’s examine where Chicago’s captain is at as an individual. Last season, as many of his teammates struggled through a Cup hangover that left them tired and underperforming, Toews set new career bests in assists (44), points (76) and plus-minus (plus-25) and had 32 goals, two shy of the career high he set in his sophomore season of 2008-09. This year, he stampeded out of the gate and through the Hawks’ first 54 games, he led the team with 27 goals and his 52 points put him one point behind Marian Hossa as the team’s leading scorer.
But Toews’ impact is far deeper than straight-ahead goals and assists. He leads the team in takeaways with 72 and is tied for second on the team in plus-minus (plus-16). He’s Chicago’s third-best game-winning goal-scorer with four. He’s third in power play goals with five. He has a shorthanded goal that puts him in third place on the team. He averages 20:48 per game, the most of any Hawks forward. He averages the third-most power-play minutes (3:19) of any Chicago player and the third-most penalty kill minutes (1:52, just behind Hossa’s 1:54 and Dave Bolland’s 1:55) of any Hawks forward. And Toews’ 59.8 faceoff win percentage is the best in the entire NHL for any player with 1,000 or more draws (he’s actually sixth in total faceoffs taken with 1,038).
If Toews were a basketball player, he’d be Oscar Robertson – the type of guy who made an impact in virtually every facet of his sport. But he draws other extremely positive comparisons to different athletic icons from those who see him often. “He reminds me of (New York Yankees legend) Derek Jeter,” said Hawks defenseman Sean O’Donnell of Toews. “It’s all about winning with him.”
Added Hawks president John McDonough: “Johnny reminds me of Ryne Sandberg,” referring to the Cubs’ Hall of Fame second baseman he watched as a 24-year executive with that Major League Baseball team. “Johnny is similar in style. Every day you’re going to get the same effort and a really solid performance. He’s a once-in-a-decade-type player. He’s a throwback and he’s old school. He’s made being serious an art form.”
There’s the word you hear all the time regarding Toews: serious. He’s so good at keeping an even keel through good times and bad, so unwilling to display emotion or even ironically cock an eyebrow in front of reporters, the nickname ‘Captain Serious’ has stuck with him whether he likes it or not. But that isn’t an indication Toews had the humorous part of his brain surgically removed to hold his focus on winning hockey games. His teammates say on team charters or during a well-chosen night on the town, he can kid and exult with the best of them.
While it’s a little bit difficult to picture Toews’ stone-cold serious face rocking out during the recent Jay-Z/Kanye West concert tour, he was indeed in attendance during the rappers’ Chicago stop. He would have liked to have been at mixed martial arts monolith UFC’s pay-per-view event in January, but the upper-body injury that kept him out of the 2012 All-Star Game in Ottawa also precluded him from joining his teammates at that event.
For Toews, finding time to take a break from hockey isn’t easy, but it is necessary, unless he wants to wither under unrelenting pressure and devolve into Captain Yahoo Serious (Google it). “We play so many games and you give so much every game you play, so it definitely can be ‘all hockey, all the time,’” Toews said. “But that’s one of the things I’ve really learned since I’ve become an NHLer – you have to find ways to get away from hockey and enjoy yourself, whether it’s going out to a restaurant or having a drink with your buddies. You just have to be smart about it. In Chicago, everyone seems to know who we are now. It’s easy for anyone to get in trouble pretty quick, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like to have fun like anyone. We have a young team and we have to be kids every once in a while, too.”
In the era of camera phones and social media, it’s nearly impossible for any superstar of Toews’ stature to keep out of the public eye. But maybe because of the only blemish on Toews’ record – a small run-in with the law when he was caught as a minor in a North Dakota tavern during his days playing college hockey at Notre Dame – he has become extremely adept at staying off the public radar and getting his fun on in a place where nobody can see. “He’s one of the most high-profile athletes in Chicago – you’d put him up there with Derek Rose, Jay Cutler, Patrick Kane,” McDonough said of Toews. “But Johnny’s very stealth. He has a lot of fun, I’m sure, in the city of Chicago, but no one would know it.”
That’s all part of the plan with Toews. Nearly everything he does, he does with the goal of getting the opportunity to make a difference with his hockey skills. When he was attending high school at world-famous hockey factory Shattuck-St.-Mary’s, he was mature enough to understand a solid two-way game would give him more on-ice opportunities at every level, so he worked feverishly on his defense at an age when most teens don’t even like to say the word, let alone buy into the concept. And if he allowed fame and frivolity to take precedence over his employment duties, he knows he wouldn’t be trusted fully and completely by coach Joel Quenneville and all members of Blackhawks management to lead the team.
And leadership is another area in which Toews excels. That serious approach, that willingness to do anything to make a difference in his team’s favor, has elicited comparisons to two other famous NHLers who wore No. 19 – Red Wings all-time great Steve Yzerman and Avalanche captain Joe Sakic. Of course, there are differences among all three players: the 6-foot-2 Toews plays a more robust physical game than Sakic or Yzerman could at 5-foot-11. But in terms of their singular devotion to winning, their reluctance to be outspoken outside the dressing room walls and their ability to impose their will on their games and their teams, there are many similarities between the three.
Toews and Yzerman have briefly been part of the same organization – once when the latter was the architect of Team Canada at the 2007 World Championship with Toews on the roster and again in the same roles at the Vancouver Olympics. And although he didn’t have much time to sit down and learn at the foot of one of hockey’s greatest masters, Toews took something away from Yzerman’s example nonetheless. “It’s amazing to see what a down-to-earth guy he is after everything he’s accomplished,” Toews said of Yzerman. “He gives everyone the time of day and doesn’t treat anyone any different. So you learn those people skills and what it takes to get that respect on and off the ice.”
The fastest way Toews has acquired that respect is with the aforementioned skill at picking up his team and carrying it on his back at the most crucial of times. Quenneville’s favorite example of that ability came in the third period of Game 7 of the Hawks’ first-round playoff series against Vancouver last spring. Chicago was trailing 1-0 and was on the penalty kill with two minutes left in regulation when Toews pressured the puck out of the Canucks zone, took possession of it at center ice, split Vancouver’s defensemen, passed the puck to Hossa as he was being dragged down, then fought his way back up and batted in the rebound from Hossa’s shot to send the game to overtime.
A similar scene occurred this past November during a Blackhawks road game in Anaheim. Chicago had lost three in a row heading into its showdown with the Ducks and trailed 4-2 after 40 minutes of play. That was apparently enough for Toews, who proceeded to notch two goals and two assists in the third period and almost singlehandedly willed the Hawks to a 6-5 win. “Johnny just wouldn’t let us lose that game,” O’Donnell said. “He played as dominating a 20-minute period as anyone I’ve seen in a long time.”
Toews can be dominating even when the opposition expects it. “He’s got that move that I know he’s going to do when he fires the puck through that five-hole and I still can’t catch up with it,” said Red Wings goalie Jimmy Howard with a laugh. “One of these days I’m going to, though. He just makes the players around him that much better. You can see the competitiveness in his eyes, the fire. He loves being out there.”
Just as he does with every other aspect of his life, Toews aches to be the best captain he can possibly be. If that means he has to step out of the team structure from time to time and assert himself in a way that draws attention to him as an individual, he’s fine with that. “A good captain is the type of guy who’s going to find a way to play his best game when maybe he can sense his team needs it the most,” Toews said. “That’s definitely the way I feel. It’s not always an easy thing to do, but if I can contribute something somehow, some way, it doesn’t matter where, you have to find a way to do something.”
Toews always finds a way to do something for the Hawks organization and hockey in general. Sometimes, it will be an emotional outburst inside the dressing room or during a game. Sometimes, it will be one of his countless public appearances to help grow the business and the league. Sometimes, it will be boosting team morale and camaraderie by doing something like sitting down with veterans like O’Donnell, watching a classic NHL game and learning how the league has evolved. And sometimes, it will be something the public never sees, like his unbreakable optimism that any problem can be solved with more willpower and hard work.
One of those problems arose in late January and early February, when the Hawks lost a season-high six straight and lost ground on Detroit in the Central Division. But there will be no angry or frustrated diatribes coming out of Toews’ mouth. He doesn’t welcome tough times, but he does expect them and never shies away from diving at them with bared fangs and balled fists. “You still have to remind yourself there are going to be some moments when you want to quit and you’re not going to want to work through it, but once you do, things start looking better,” Toews said. “Everyone prepares for these kinds of things. This is how we put ourselves up for the test and see what we’ve got.”
What the Hawks have got is Jonathan Toews – and that’s a whole lot. That’s more than some teams ever will have in the same span and something each of the other 29 GMs would sell off a favorite body part to acquire. With Crosby’s concussion issues and Datsyuk nearing his mid-30s, Toews is the surest bet you can make on any NHLer. Yeah, he’s surrounded by a lot of talent that has factored into his success, but he would be succeeding no matter where he played.
“The best description I’ve heard about Crosby is he’s an elite player with a fourth-liner’s mentality and I think the same can be said about Johnny,” O’Donnell said. “There’s a certain gene you can’t teach and he has it. And when you get a combination of a player who has world-class ability, but also has that leadership and focus, he’s not going to be stopped.”
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