EDMONTON — It’s only about a 20-minute drive from the Saddledome to Calgary International Airport, but the Blackhawks sure made the most of it on Thursday night. They had just come off maybe their best team effort of the season, getting a goal from all four lines in beating the Flames and silencing their fans, and they were feeling pretty, pretty good about it.
From his seat up front, all Luke Richardson could do was smile.
“Just roaring, laughing,” the Blackhawks’ first-year coach said. “I haven’t heard that from a hockey team in a while. The last time I did was with the Canadiens a couple of years ago, when we went to the finals. There’s no mystery there — when you’re winning, you’re having fun. And when you overachieve, you’re having more fun because you know you’re heckling the naysayers.”
That Montreal team was as unlikely a Stanley Cup finalist as there’s ever been, a mediocre-on-a-good-night 24-21-11 team taking advantage of a one-time-only all-Canada division before upsetting Vegas to forge a path to the Final. Winning a January regular-season game to barely stay out of dead last in the league isn’t quite the same thing, but there’s a general screw-the-haters vibe that transcends such stakes.
The Blackhawks, you see, don’t care about your tank. They don’t care about the draft lottery. They don’t care about Connor Bedard. Not in the slightest. And they’re having quite a bit of fun messing with general manager Kyle Davidson’s (smart, if cynical) grand design.
“That’s why we play the game, right?” said defenseman Seth Jones, who’s been bristling at the very idea of losing to win since Day 1 of training camp. “We’re trying to win every game we play. We’ve got to control what we can control here, and obviously the front office, they control that.”
Seth Jones and Andreas Athanasiou. (Jamie Sabau/USA Today)
Thatof course, is a concerted effort by the franchise to finish in 32nd place this season, in order to ensure a top-three pick in a highly touted draft and secure the best odds of drafting Bedard, the kind of rare talent who could dramatically alter the Blackhawks’ future for the better.
That, is what commissioner Gary Bettman hilariously denied happens in the NHL. But Bettman, ever the lawyer, chose his words wisely, specifically saying that players don’t tank, that coaches don’t tank. And he’s absolutely right. Richardson said it himself, right after he was hired, that he was going to try to make things as difficult as possible for Davidson, and Davidson welcomed the defiance.
Does he still welcome it now that the Blackhawks are entering their bye week having won a modest-yet-sort-of-stunning seven of their last 11 games, bringing Columbus, Anaheim, Arizona and San Jose back into the race for the bottom?
Well, the Blackhawks don’t really care. Nobody in that locker room is sitting around waiting for some 17-year-old to come and save them.
Or take their job, for that matter.
“No, no, definitely not,” forward MacKenzie Entwistle said. “Your goal is to win the Stanley Cup. Where we pick and stuff, that’s something that we can’t control. Every single guy here doesn’t want to lose. If you get the first-overall pick, chances are you lost and you had a pretty bad year. So every guy in this room wants to win. The higher we place, the better for us.”
In theory, the higher the Blackhawks pick, the better for the franchise. That’s why Davidson and his staff have spent as much, if not more, time at junior and college games than Blackhawks road games this season. Just this week, they were with every other team’s scouting staff at the CHL Top Prospect Game. They wanted to see Bedard, naturally, but they weren’t being myopic, either. Davidson knows that picking fourth, fifth or sixth is every bit as realistic as picking first, second or third. Especially if the Blackhawks keep playing competitive hockey.
Which they’re going to keep trying to do, no matter how many prospects stay in Rockford, no matter how many players get dealt away in the next five weeks, no matter how much agita it causes everyone outside that room.
Oilers forward Evander Kane missed Buffalo’s epic tank season of 2014-15 by a year, arriving from Winnipeg the following fall. But Kane knows what it’s like to be on a team whose front office is paying more attention to the draft than the regular season, and it’s not a great feeling as a player. He also knows the folly of putting too much hope in the draft lottery. After all, the Sabers finished in dead last season, but Connor McDavid — the prize of that 2015 draft — is his teammate in Edmonton, not Buffalo.
In the room, there’s always something to play for. And it’s never some kid who’s never played in the NHL.
“I’ve played on some teams that haven’t done very well in the past, and there are lots of different reasons to play your best, whether that’s contractually, whether that’s getting another opportunity somewhere else, playing for pride. Guys are competitive in this league no matter what team you’re on or where you are in the standings. You see that in Chicago, and Columbus (which won in Edmonton) the other night.”
Davidson has acknowledged the cognitive dissonance that comes with running a team that’s in tank mode (he’d call it rebuilding mode). His grand plan hinges largely on the draft and maximizing the down seasons (“losing the right way,” as Mike Babcock once referred to the way the Blackhawks rebuilt around Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane). But Davidson also said that every time the puck drops, he instinctively wants the Blackhawks to win. It’s his team, how could he not?
Blackhawks fans are in a similar position. They’re savvy enough to know that losing is probably better in the long run, but when you fork out hundreds of dollars to attend a game with the family — or even just devote a couple hours of your time to the broadcast — you want to see a win, right? It’s just more fun.
Heck, the Blackhawks fans’ admirable hardiness this season — the average United Center crowd of 16,765 has far exceeded the team’s internal expectations — would suggest that fans side more with the players and coaching staff than with the front office.
“It’s hard not to play to win in a passionate city like Chicago,” Richardson said. “You have that national anthem and you hear those people roaring — and they stay in their seats. In Canada, you have grumbles and they’re leaving for the exits when there’s four minutes left, like the other night (in Calgary). We played Seattle (a ghastly 8-5 loss in Chicago on Jan. 14) and they sat there until the end of the game, and they cheered at the end when we scored. Were we going to catch up? No. But that’s impressive. So how do you not play hard and be even more energetic to get to the finish line, or at least take a step toward the finish line, to where we want to go?”
So it’s your fault the tank is teetering a bit. And it’s Richardson’s fault. And it’s the players’ fault. Because as we’ve been saying all year, teams tank. Players don’t.
And they don’t feel the least bit bad about it.
“We’re taking this one game at a time,” Jones said. “And we’ll let management and those guys handle that.”
(Top photo of Colin Blackwell, MacKenzie Entwistle and Sam Lafferty: Derek Leung / Getty Images)
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