From November 2007: Rookies Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews Lead "Windy City Revival"

This evening, Patrick Kane will play a game at the United Center in Chicago for the first time as a player for the road time, representing instead the Blackhawks' bitter Original Six rival, the Detroit Red Wings.  In honor of Kane's return, let's take a dip into the THN Archive for a story from Kane's rookie year in Chiacgo:  

"Windy City Revival: Fast-Rising Rookie Stars Breathe New Life into Long-Suffering Hawks" by Ken Campbell

November 27, 2007 / Vol. 61, Issue 10

It was a brief exchange to be sure and Dale Tallon only caught it out of the corner of his eye. While his team was standing on the tarmac, waiting to board a plane from Minnesota back to Chicago, Tallon watched as an injured Jonathan Toews walked up to Patrick Kane and gave him a bear hug. He saw Toews say something to Kane, which he later learned was to the effect of, “Hey kid, you played a great game tonight. Good start.”

The Blackhawks had just been defeated 1-0 in their season opener and had lost their best player yet again when Martin Havlat went down with a shoulder injury after a third period scrum. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The Hawks have been prodigious losers over the past few years and Havlat can never seem to stay healthy.

But for Tallon, it signaled the start of something very significant for a franchise that finally is back on the path to respectability after being lost in the wilderness for most of the past decade.

“I just thought to myself, ‘We really have something special here,’ ” said the Hawks GM.

The rest of the NHL is learning the same thing, not just about the two 19-year-old wunderkinds, but about the organization itself. After years of on-ice failure, front-office disarray and general irrelevance, Chicago is experiencing a renaissance and rejuvenation, largely due to the birth of two promising careers and, without sounding too morbid, the death of owner Bill Wirtz.

More than anything, professional sports teams sell hope, and prior to this year, there had been precious little of that in Chicago. That has changed with Toews and Kane, and the bold, progressive moves made by new Hawks president Rocky Wirtz, who kept his distance from the team when his father was in charge, largely because his vision of success for the organization was so diametrically opposed to that of his dad.

“Rocky and Bill argued about things for years,” Tallon said. “But Rocky just said the other day that once we’ve turned this around and started winning, the first guy who would’ve patted him on the back would’ve been Bill.”

But this is a bit of a touchy one for the Hawks. How exactly do they embrace the bright new future and move in a decidedly different direction without looking as though they’re dancing on Bill Wirtz’s grave? To be sure, the organization knows exactly how its dwindling fan base felt about Wirtz. When Tallon eulogized Wirtz prior to an Oct. 27 home game against Atlanta, he could barely be heard over the incessant booing and catcalling.

“I’ll tell you, a couple of times I wanted to stop and tell everyone to shut the ‘F’ up,” Tallon said. “The only thing that kept me going through that was that I knew Bill Wirtz for 30 years and I know how he loved this team and loved this game. If those people knew him like I’ve known him for the past 30 years, they would never have done that.”

Forgive the good people of Chicago for their indiscretion, but how much Wirtz loved his team, his status as an industry giant in the Midwest and his many good deeds for charities meant jack-squat to fans who have waited for a Stanley Cup since 1961 (the longest drought of any NHL team, if you were thinking of checking). It was the decline under Wirtz’s watch that had fans putting the most striking sweaters in pro sports into mothballs.

Case in point occurred Oct. 19 at the United Center when Toews sped through the neutral zone, took a pass from Kane and proceeded to score a goal that people in Chicago haven’t seen since the days of Denis Savard. Savard, who now coaches the team, called it the goal of the year. Toews got the puck in the neutral zone, darted between Milan Hejduk and Scott Hannan of Colorado, turned defenseman Brett Clark into a pretzel and then deked Jose Theodore before scoring. The goal was so spectacular it prompted Avalanche analyst Peter McNab to opine, “This is the kind of talent that could bring a franchise back from the dead.”

It was fitting Toews acknowledged he “blacked out” during his dazzling array of moves, because any Hawks fans who wanted to watch the goal on TV were blacked out as well. Just 13,519 (an inflated attendance figure) saw the goal because of Bill Wirtz’s stubborn insistence on not televising home games. However, the patriarch died six days later and Rocky immediately took over. Within two weeks, he had secured a deal that will see seven home games televised this season, with an eye to putting up to 70 games on the airwaves next year.

But skeptical former fans are still going to need convincing. While the team has created a buzz, the Hawks were still drawing terribly. Through nine home games, they were dead last in announced attendance at 12,622 per game, including a dismal crowd of just 9,717 to watch them beat Columbus 5-2 Nov. 7.

Aside from the controlled atmosphere in news conferences, Rocky Wirtz has not spoken extensively about his new role or his plans for the team. But his actions have spoken volumes already. Aside from adding televised games, he also moved senior vice-president Bob Pulford out of the hockey department to a job in the Wirtz offices across town. Although his impact had diminished, Pulford had come to symbolize how stale and predictable the Hawks had become and his specter constantly hung over the front office. The Hawks have filled their front office with progressive hockey minds such as Rick Dudley (assistant GM), Stan Bowman (hockey operations) and Marc Bergevin (director of pro scouting).

“At least there’s hope now and that’s not something we had when we weren’t doing things the right way,” Tallon said. “We’re doing things the right way now.”

And it all starts with Kane and Toews, the foundations for the future of the franchise. The Hawks have been loathe to place too much pressure on the teenagers, but the kids have gone out and been the team’s best players anyway. With Havlat out of the lineup for the first part of the season, both Kane and Toews were immediately placed into front-line roles and responded by being the top two rookies in the league.

“I guess it’s pretty surprising that two young guys could develop like this,” said Kane, the first overall draft pick last June. “We don’t expect sick stuff to happen right off the bat.”

That’s the way the kids talk these days. When something is really good, it’s sick. And Kane and Toews both have been pretty sick so far this season. They also room together on the road and have become close friends. Kane always takes the bed furthest from the door and Toews gets control of the remote.

“He always says that he was drafted a year before me,” Kane said. “But I point out to him I have two more games under my belt because he missed the first two games of the season with a broken finger, so I should be the room captain.”

The Hawks’ theme for this season is “Red Rising” and their advertising campaign focused on the young talent in the organization. Morning commuters on the Eisenhower Expressway are greeted with a bill-board featuring Toews and those on the Kennedy or Tri-State routes see billboards with Kane’s face on them.

Which is fitting, since Kane and Toews have emerged as the faces of the franchise. The Hawks have been so bad for so long that they have an impressive array of young talent, but Kane and Toews have quickly turned that potential into results and people are starting to take notice. What has impressed most observers is that both of the kids are salt-of-the-earth guys and have yet to get caught up in the hype.

“We’ve been the ones who have gotten most of the media and the attention here, but we owe a lot to our teammates and coaches for the opportunities we’re getting,” Toews said. “It’s almost unfair how much credit we seem to be getting.”

Well, Kane did have the best October of any NHL rookie since Teemu Selanne and Joe Juneau in 1992 and Toews began his NHL career with a 12-game point streak. There’s no doubt they are Chicago’s best players – not just their best young players, their best players, period.

But the Hawks have had talented players before, only to lose them largely because they were too cheap to keep them. The money they did spend on free agents was often directed at the wrong kinds of players and even Tallon himself admits he misread the new NHL out of the lockout and tried to build a team on grit rather than speed and skill

“That was my fault,” he said. “But I like the direction we’re going in now.”

Much of that direction will be charted by another Hawks rookie, Rocky Wirtz. When Bill died, most figured control of the team would be assumed by 47-year-old vice-president Peter Wirtz, but it was the other son Rocky who quickly took over and began making changes.

Until now, Rocky had only been known by fans as part of the old Chicago family that built its fortune at the turn of the century when Rocky’s grandfather, Arthur, made a mint in real estate. As president of the Wirtz-owned Judge & Dolph liquor distributorship, Rocky was behind the scenes until taking over the team. In fact, until recently Rocky was better known for a very ugly, very public, four-year divorce battle in which he and his wife fought over everything from a Coors beer distributorship to who would replace a stove top damaged during a fire.

The proceedings gave a glimpse into the lifestyle and spending habits of one of America’s richest families. And it was also used as fodder by former NHL Players’ Association executive director Bob Goodenow when he attempted to portray the owners as being less than truthful about their wealth prior to the lockout.

Much will also depend on how well the Blackhawks ultimately surround their two young phenoms over the next couple of seasons. The Blackhawks have had a top-10 selection in each of the past four drafts and have some promising young talent in the likes of Michael Blunden, David Bolland and Cam Barker to go with a pretty impressive array of youthful players already in the lineup. And it’s easy to forget Havlat is just 26 and has the potential to be an elite offensive player if he could only stay healthy for an extended period of time. On most nights, the Hawks have eight homegrown draftees in the lineup, with the potential to add another four or five next season. If those players develop properly and the Hawks fill in with some quality free agents, the franchise’s on-ice trajectory will be pointing upward.

And it will be up to Toews and Kane to do for the Hawks what they were unable to do for the Junior Flyers, an elite summer hockey team that was put together in 2002 when Toews was 14 and Kane was a couple of months shy of his 14th birthday. Although the team was made up of the best players from Toronto and Buffalo, they picked up Winnipeg native Toews after watching him at a tournament in Regina.

“I came to that team and (Kane) outscored me in the first tournament we played in and I wasn’t really used to that,” Toews said.

“I was saying, ‘Who the heck is this little guy?’ He was the same player back then that he is now. He was special even back then.”

Surprisingly, the team entered two tournaments and crapped out in both. In one tournament in Toronto, they finished third and didn’t even medal in a subsequent tournament in Montreal.

When asked what on earth happened, Toews perhaps gives an indication of what the Blackhawks have to do in the coming years if they want their two young stars to lead them to a Stanley Cup.

“I guess we couldn’t carry the team by ourselves,” he said. ■

The 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

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