Chicago Blackhawks On Successful, Exciting Rebuild: 40 Years Ago

There was no roar, just a lot of empty seats, in the old Chicago Stadium during most of the 1970s.

Once Bobby Hull left the Chicago Blackhawks in 1972 for the WHA, the team slipped into decline. The club bottomed out in 1976-77 with a 26-43-11 record and 63 points.

In an era before free agency, rebuilding really took time. Per this The Hockey News story by Neil Milbert, also a long-time Chicago Tribune sports writer, the Blackhawks turned it around after hiring Bob Pulford as their general manager.

By the 1980s, the Blackhawks were exciting and good again, playing before sellout crowds with a high-energy, aggressive forecheck style on the short, 185-foot Stadium ice surface. 

The line of Denis Savard, Steve Larmer and Al Secord was one of the most dynamic trios in the NHL. Smooth-skating defenseman Doug Wilson, an eventual Norris Trophy winner, was unleashing a booming shot. Tom Lysiak was putting up points and playing physically.

Orval Tessier was behind the bench of a team that in 1983 collected 104 points and might have been the second-best in the NHL. 

The barrier: The emerging powerhouse Edmonton Oilers and Wayne Gretzky were in the way in the conference finals. Tessier's temper got the best him when he said his team needed heart transplants during Edmonton's four-game sweep that spring.

Read all about how that club was built in this April 8, 1983 article from the amazing new THN Archive. THN Archive is an exclusive vault of 2,640 issues and more than 156,000 stories for subscribers, chronicling the complete history of The Hockey News from 1947 until today. Visit THN.com/archive and subscribe today at subscribe.thehockeynews.com

By Neil Milbert

From The Hockey News Archive, April 8, 1983. Vol.36. Issue 26

The remaking of the Black Hawks from a team on the skids back into one of the premier franchises in the National Hockey League began on July 6, 1977, when team president Bill Wirtz chose Bob Pulford as coach and general manager.

According to Wirtz: “He’s the man responsible for the rebirth of hockey in Chicago that we’ve witnessed.”

Patience, prudence, and potholes along the way have made Pulford’s team what it is today.

The talent pool perhaps is comparable to what it was in the late 1960s and early ’70s when Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita were at the height of their careers and young Tony Esposito was the game’s most dominant goaltender.

Night after night, roaring throngs congregate in Chicago Stadium. Once again, hockey tickets are the hottest item in the toddlin’ town that Billy Sunday couldn’t cool down.

But Pulford and Wirtz will admit it hasn’t been easy.

“There were decent players here when I came,” recalled Pulford. “I didn’t take over a team that didn’t have talent but the talent wasn’t going to win a championship.

“That’s why things were done. Some were not easy to do. Some were not met with a great deal of acceptance.

“But, when you first start out, you have to move a lot of people, bring in people, then go through a period of waiting. You have to wait for people to develop.”

Prior to becoming a coach, Pulford played for 16 seasons in the NHL. After spending 14 years in Toronto, he concluded his career in Los Angeles. Never an individual award recipient nor an AllStar selection, he nevertheless was regarded as one of the foremost centers of his time.

Upon retiring as a player, he immediately was chosen coach of the Kings.

During the next five years, Pully proved himself to be a highly capable coach. However, he came to the conclusion that he wasn’t cut out to be a coach for the rest of his hockey career.

When Wirtz decided to promote Tommy Ivan from general manager to vicepresident. he offered Pulford the dual responsibilities of GM and coach with the understanding that the latter job would be relinquished after two years.

Pulford said yes. In his first season in Chicago, the Hawks amassed 83 points—a 20-point improvement over the previous year—and Pulford was selected Coach of the Year by THE HOCKEY NEWS.

“It was easy to do that,” said Pulford. “It was like going from 100 to 80 in golf. But it’s difficult to improve after that.”

The difficulty was underscored the next year when the Hawks finished with 10 fewer points.

As planned, Pulford retired from coaching to concentrate on his work as general manager in the summer of 1979. As expected, Eddie Johnston, who’d been successful in his coaching debut with the New Brunswick farm team, was promoted to succeed him.

And, as projected, the Hawks thrived under Johnston, whose method of handling players was relaxed in comparison to Pulford’s supposedly austere style. They wound up seventh in the overall standings with 87 points and swept St. Louis in the first round of the playoffs before being eliminated by Buffalo.

“I think hockey in Chicago is going to come back by leaps and bounds in the next decade,” predicted Wirtz in February of that season.

But then the Hawks hit a gigantic pothole. Discussions with Johnston’s agent, Bill Watters, over a new contract became a tug of war with neither side willing to budge. Negotiations broke off and on Friday, June 13, 1980, Keith Magnuson, the tenacious defenseman who’d retired and became Johnston’s assistant, was named his successor as coach.

There was a backlash from the customers in Chicago Stadium when Magnuson was unable to emulate Johnston’s success. In his first year, the Hawks got off to a fast start, slumped badly, equalled a team-record by winning eight straight, then fell off again, and made an immediate exit from the playoffs.

Last season, the team became devastated by injuries in December and the situation deteriorated rapidly. With the team in the throes of a 10-game winless streak (0-9-1), Pulford reluctantly gave Magnuson a six-game vacation and reassumed command.

Immediately, the Hawks responded. They scored a team record five goals in the first period of his first game and went on to trounce St. Louis 9-5. At the end of the six-game stint, the Hawks had four triumphs and two losses and seemed to have snapped out of their slump.

But on Magnuson’s first night back, the Hawks regressed and took a beating from St. Louis. When the course of the contest had become apparent after two periods, Magnuson told the players that he was through.

The resignation was announced after the game and Pulford became the interim coach for the second time. “In today’s hockey, it is impossible to do both jobs, to be both coach and general manager,” he said at the time.

“But now, there’s no alternative.”

This time, however, the Hawks stayed in their daze and when the regular season ended they were wobbling along in fourth place.

Then, came the playoffs. And, abruptly, the potential that Pulford and Wirtz had always believed was there manifested itself in action.

The Hawks lowered the boom on Minnesota in the opening round, then socked it to St.Louis. It wasn’t until the Stanley Cup semi-finals that Chicago finally was brought under control by the Vancouver Canucks.

True to his word, Pulford went back to concentrating on his work as general manager. To succeed him as coach, he called upon 49-year-old Orval Tessier, who’d won the American League championship on the farm in New Brunswick.

Tessier’s success story is documented in detail elsewhere in this issue as is the team chemistry.

But Pulford was the catalyst.

Only three players on the current roster—Esposito, defenseman Bob Murray, and injured right winger Grant Mulvey—remain from the squad that he assembled at his first Chicago training camp in 1977.

Much of the renovation has been done through the draft. Fifteen Hawks (counting incumbents Bob Murray and Mulvey) were handpicked and homegrown.

Of Pulford’s trades, two can be considered major:

The March 13, 1979, deal with Atlanta in which Tom Lysiak, Greg Fox, and three others no longer with Chicago (Miles Zaharko, Pat Ribble, and Harold Phillipoff) were acquired in exchange for Phil Russell, Darcy Rota, and Ivan Boldirev.

• The straight player swap of Dec. 18, 1980, that turned Al Secord into the most prolific Chicago goal-scorer since Bobby Hull and made a Boston Bruin out of resourceful defenseman Mike O’Connell.

But making a deal with the Black Hawks isn’t as simple as picking up the phone and calling Pulford.

Six people discuss every important transaction, Bill Wirtz revealed. They are: Wirtz himself; Pulford; assistant GM Jack Davison; Ivan; Bill’s brother, Michael Wirtz, who like Ivan is listed on the table of organization as the vicepresident; and the coach.

“It has always been that way,” Bill explained. “Sometimes we make a mistake, like trading away Phil Esposito, a lousy trade in retrospect.”

The power of Bill Wirtz goes far beyond his 16 years as president of the Black Hawks. Last summer, he was unanimously re-elected Chairman of the NHL’s Board of Governors, an office he has held for nine years. He may be the most influential individual in the NHL.

Wirtz holds the World Hockey Association responsible for the ills that visited the NHL in general and the Black Hawks in particular during the ’70s. He still has a hard spot in his heart for the Chicago Cougars (who went out of busines long before their league’s survivors were taken into the NHL in the summer of 1979.)

“We—the Black Hawks and the sport of hockey—lost our mystique in Chicago when that club on the South Side came into existence,” insisted Wirtz.

Those were the hard times.

Three years ago, when he foretold the evolution of the Hawks as a member of the NHL’s higher echelon, Bill Wirtz also said;

“Hockey is the greatest game in the world.

“My dad (the Hawk’s chairman of the board, Arthur Wirtz) and the late Jim Norris together had almost a century of experience with virtually every major sport and they said that it was the greatest. They couldn’t have been wrong for that many years.

“In Chicago Stadium, anybody can fill the box seats. That’s where you have corporate season-ticket holders and wealthy individuals. What I want to fill is the first balcony. It’s going to happen again and it’s going to be filled night after night. Cable TV will help me do it. You’ll see.”

Indeed, it has come to pass and the best seems yet to come. ■