Blackhawks Mired In Darkness Before New Dawn. Can History Repeat With Connor Bedard & Co?

The Blackhawks teams of the late 1990s and into the 2000s were mostly disjointed and dreary. Chicago missed the playoffs for nine of 10 seasons from 1997-98 through 2007-08, the rookie year for Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews.

Sound familiar?

With Kane, the first overall draft pick of 2007, and Toews in the lineup, the Blackhawks surged at the end of '07-08 and finished above .500. Future Stanley Cup heroes Patrick Sharp, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook were starting to roll, too. 

The parallels to the current team are clear. The names and the timing are little different. 

This time Connor Bedard, the top 2023 draft selection, is supposed to lead the way from the darkness. Prospects Kevin Korchinski, Lukas Reichel, Alex Vlasic, Philipp Kurashev, Wyatt Kaiser — and eventually Drew Commesso, Colton Dach, Oliver Moore and Sam Rinzel — are expected to light a better path forward.

But before the Blackhawks burst back into the playoff in 2008-09, points and good hockey were hard to come by at the United Center. 

Then-GM Dale Tallon and his staff did find most of the core stars of Chicago's 2010, 2013 and 2015 Stanley Cup teams. But before that, they stumbled, opting instead for heavy, slower players of a bygone era while the NHL was getting quicker and more skilled.

This cover story from the Jan. 31, 2006 edition of The Hockey News details the team's struggles before the Blackhawks rose to become a contender again.

For stories like this, dating back to 1947, subscribe to The Hockey News at thn.com/free for access to the enormous The Hockey News Archive and receive a free special edition. 

By Mark Brender

CHICAGO – Strangely, with the very first note from baritone Patrick Blackwell, loud clapping begins. There’s energy in the building, no doubt about it, and the place looks surprisingly full for a team that’s supposed to have trouble drawing its own curtains, let alone a full house. By the time Blackwell hits the home stretch, the clapping has turned into an ovation and the rink is rocking and it makes you wonder, with this kind of passion, what’s with all the doom and gloom?

When Andy Hilbert opens the scoring on a nifty backhand six minutes into the first and pulls another backhand job five minutes later, it’s welcome to High-Five-Ville at the United Center. The sold-out United Center, we might add, the third one of the year (the first two were for Detroit). Midway through the third period, when Martin Lapointe pushes home a rebound and leaps into the glass in celebration, the Blackhawks faithful, pardon the redundancy, are whooping it up like frat boys on free beer night.

An hour later on television, the anchor on the local Comcast SportsNet affiliate is talking about the treat its viewers saw tonight – “a Hawk home game, our first of the year!” – and how especially sweet it is given the result, a well deserved 4-1 win over Pittsburgh. The home telecast is a surprise gift from president and owner Bill Wirtz in honor of Sidney Crosby’s first visit to town. The Hawks have televised home contests on other occasions – Mario Lemieux’s first game back from retirement and on Denis Savard’s banner-raising ceremony, for example – but it’s hardly an everyday event.

Tonight, the broadcast has added to the sense of occasion. For a night, at least, they’re all thinking the same thing – the fans and the beat writers and the scouts and everyone else who knew this team when it was something more than a punch line.

“This,” they say, “is what it used to be like.”

The Hawks haven’t had many championship days; they own just one Stanley Cup from the past six decades, the worst of any Original Six team. But they have had their glory days. A generation ago, when Savard and Darryl Sutter and Dirk Graham and Steve Larmer and Bob Probert created mayhem in rollicking Chicago Stadium, the Hawks were a happening.

These days, due to a mix of bad luck, questionable decisions and outright neglect, it’s what’s happening to the same-old Hawks in the new NHL that is the story…buried deep in the sports section.

Despite a handful of free agent signings led by $6.75-million-a-year goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, this is what the Hawks are today: a talentstarved, injury-racked team whose veterans have been hurt and underachieving; whose kids are giving a valiant effort while playing too high on the depth chart; whose ownership remains stuck in the 1970s; all performing to below-average crowds in games that have little meaning for those outside the organization.

By now, in this sports-mad city, Hawks failures are mostly assumed if they’re thought about at all, their limited successes either ignored, overlooked or quickly forgotten.

The Hawks have made the postseason once in the past seven years. They haven’t won a playoff series since 1996, a record of futility surpassed only by the New York Islanders and Phoenix Coyotes. Stung by a 10-game mid-season losing skid, they sat in 26th place overall and won’t be improving on post-season failures for another year at least.

Two days after the Penguins game, the Hawks faced New Jersey at home on Jan. 15, which was also the day of the Chicago Bears’ home playoff game. For the announced 11,117 fans who headed to United Center instead of Soldier Field or the nearest bar, it was akin to checking out the underground chess scene in Rome while a new pope was being inaugurated in Vatican Square. (And if the 20,500-seat United Center was more than half full against Jersey, then Radim Vrbata is the next Stan Mikita.)

That very morning, Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey wrote a piece comparing Windy City sports teams. After giving treatment to the unique personalities of Bears, Cubs, Bulls and White Sox followers, the hockey-heads received a one-line brush-off: “Hawks fans go to Wolves games.” That would be the Chicago Wolves, the AHL club.

It’s impossible not to come to Chicago without a lament for what once was, what is, and the seemingly canyon-like gulf between the two.

“I expected more, obviously, and it just hasn’t happened,” says straight-shooting GM Dale Tallon. “Our future is very bright with the kids we have. We’re going to get back…We’ve got to build some trust and some faith and that’s just the way it is.”

Perhaps if the task were only up to Tallon, it would be easier to believe him. He has a good reputation and widespread respect in the hockey world as a man who does his research, drafts well and works hard.

It is true that on defense, rookies Brent Seabrook and Duncan Keith have been revelations and are bursting with promise. It’s easy to project three years down the road and see them anchoring one of the NHL’s best young defense corps along with Cam Barker, Anton Babchuk and Jim Vandermeer. The forward ranks will also be bolstered; Chicago had an NHL-high eight players at the recent World Junior Championship, including four on Canada’s gold medal winning team. Another high lottery pick in 2006 will add to a long prospect list. So yes, good things may be coming.

Yet the on-ice situation is only one part of the problem. The club says attendance is up 13 per cent over 2003-04, but it’s stretching credulity to take that as a sign of real progress. This is an Original Six team trying to get by on expansion club standards.

In the Hawks organization, unless you’re the man sitting at the top of the pyramid, the best intentions in the world can only take you so far.

If it’s impossible to draw a straight line from owner Bill Wirtz’s ban on home games appearing on local television and the Hawks’ onice failures, it’s not because people haven’t put in the effort.

But the reality is, television has had nothing to do with defenseman Adrian Aucoin’s five groin injuries or Khabibulin’s shaky early play and subsequent groin injury, or Eric Daze’s annual back surgery or the severed ankle tendon of star-crossed forward Tuomo Ruutu. For the Pittsburgh game, the Hawks had $17 million in payroll on the ice and about the same on the trainer’s table.

Wirtz can’t be blamed, not directly, for his team being the most penalized in the NHL, nor for the fact that none of major free agent acquisitions Aucoin or Khabibulin or Jassen Cullimore have set the world on fire when they’ve been in the lineup. It probably doesn’t fall entirely on Wirtz’s shoulders, either, that the Hawks entered this season with 15 new bodies compared to the team that ended 2003-04 (though wiping contracts off the books to prepare for a post-CBA NHL clearly was an organizational decision). The way it turned out, the lack of familiarity plus the new rules plus a new coach in Trent Yawney made it tough to establish chemistry once hockey returned.

But it’s television that lets the “kick-’em-when-they’re-down” mentality run wild. Wirtz is so embarrassingly alone on the TV front – the Hawks are the lone home telecast holdout among 90 franchises in the NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball (the NFL doesn’t allow local TV deals) – that when the team also struggles in the standings, the tendency is to write off the Hawks all over again.

Quite apart from whether it makes good business sense trying to entice people to the rink by denying them exposure to your product, choosing the stick over the carrot seems a particularly poor message to send coming out of the lockout. Saying the policy may be revisited when fans return smacks of hardline heavy-handedness: if the Hawks won’t give the benefit of the doubt to their fans now, why should fans be expected to give it to the team?

The morning after the Penguins game, at the Hawks’ suburban practice facility, people were talking about what they saw on TV the night before. Kids there for their minor hockey games – Matthew Barnaby’s son Matthew lost 5-2 – were talking about it, too. That can’t happen as much for the televised Hawks’ road games because, playing in the Western Conference, half of them are out of Chicago’s time zone; by the time those games start, the kids might be in bed. It doesn’t seem to make much sense.

While we’re at it, neither does the fact Yawney had to do his own video work as coach in Norfolk (AHL) a few years back because the organization wouldn’t supply him with an assistant. It used to take Yawney three-and-a-half hours to edit down game film to a 12-minute tape to show his team. His wife, Charlene, got so fed up with never seeing him that she took the job herself so they could have more family time.

Then there’s the kafuffle about Wirtz supposedly not reporting any revenue from luxury suites on the league’s revenue reporting sheets prior to the lockout. The players used that as a rallying cry for their refusal to trust the owners. (It was all hogwash, as it turned out; it’s amazing what a good accountant can do when the players help set the rules.) So why bring up that drudge all over again now? It’s the pile-on principle at work. It can’t be helped.

On the television front, Tallon had this to say: “Listen, it’s not my bat and ball. I don’t have an answer for you. It’s Mr. Wirtz’s decision and that’s the way it is.”

A Blackhawks spokesman said Wirtz was unavailable for an interview for this story.

Over at the practice rink, Yawney soldiers on. He’s running a 1-2-2 neutral zone drill. The first forward in tries to attack the puck-holding defenseman at an angle that will prevent the cross-ice D-to-D pass. The idea is that proper positional pressure will force the puck either up the boards or to the middle of the ice, right into the heart of the trap.

Against New Jersey the Hawks perform it well; the Devils, playing their best hockey of the season, are repeatedly forced to regroup in their own end and are fortunate to come away with a 3-2 shootout win. Chicago works hard, as Tallon says they have in all but a small handful of games, but the lack finishing touch hurts.

“They don’t show up to disappoint our fans,” Yawney says. “Whoever it is, they’re out there trying to do their best. That’s the biggest piece of bull going that they show up to do bad. They’re proud athletes like every other team. There’s other teams that struggle too. It’s not like they show up to do bad. There’s certain players (in the NHL), I guess, he’s a high-end player and he wants to get a coach fired, he tanks it. Well, the coach is an easy target. But in terms of our guys? No way.”

The Hawks get into trouble by making bad decisions with the puck, Yawney says. He wants his team to do a better job recognizing situations and identifying the open ice. If the opposing defensemen are backing in that’s one thing, but if they’re standing up and the open ice is behind them, the Hawks need to dump and chase. The neutral zone turnovers are the killers.

“We’ve got to live and breathe and die with the system because it works,” Martin Lapointe says. “You can’t have two or three guys not doing it. I remember when I was with teams in Detroit, Scotty (coach Scotty Bowman) made everybody believe in the system. We lived and died on it, on that system, and everybody was doing it…. When we get the puck in and start forechecking, there’s not a lot of teams out there that can handle pressure.”

The remarkable part of this story is that on the defensive side of things, the Hawks have actually been quite good. They are eighthbest in the league in shots against, averaging fewer than upper-echelon teams like Ottawa and Philadelphia, even while their penalty woes have left them shorthanded more than any other club.

That puts the problem squarely between the goalposts. Khabibulin, with a 3.34 goalsagainst average and .880 save percentage, counts himself among the newcomer veterans who were trying too hard early in the season.

“You come to a new club, you obviously want to do well and you can get carried away with it,” he says. “It can backfire on you and I think that’s probably what happened early in the year, and we didn’t really recover…

“The last couple of years that I played in Tampa I got used to winning, so really when you lose now it’s in a way kind of like, what’s going on? And I think in a way it’s good. I can’t get used to losing. I just hate losing. I think stuff like that drives an athlete. I know it does me. I just can’t stand losing.”

Tallon doesn’t plan on standing pat, either. Deals to acquire forwards Radim Vrbata and Patrick Sharp have worked out well. While forwards Ruutu and Mark Bell figure to be untouchables, other Hawks will be on the move before the season is out (Aucoin is the only one with a no-trade clause). The Hawks take comfort knowing they have a stud goalie in Khabibulin; he had been playing better before his injury and can’t stay slumping forever.

It will take much longer, though, for anyone outside the organization to pay attention.

The Bears may be done and the Bulls struggling, but due to a quirky schedule and the Olympic break, the Hawks don’t play a single home game in the month of February. When they return home in March, spring training is on – which means it’s Cubbies and White Sox, 24/7.

Except as Tallon surely knows, the remaining games mean plenty. The GM plans to be active again in the free agent market. So far, last year’s crop has been a flop. If this group doesn’t use the second half to prove their potential, it will be even more of a challenge to find the infusion of top-end offensive talent that Chicago so desperately needs.

And home games on television will be as far away as ever.

BY THE NUMBERS

95 Man-games lost to injury by Eric Daze, Tuomo Ruutu and Nikolai Khabibulin

45 Years since last Stanley Cup (1961)

8 Coaches since Mike Keenan left in 1992

5 Playoff games since 1997 (lost 1st round series 4-1 against St. Louis in 2001)

4 Blackhawks players who have dressed in every game this season

1 Bench boss who had previous NHL head coaching experience, out of the past six Hawks coaches ■