Not until he reached the locker room could Jeremy Roenick move from here to there without being elbowed. After three hours upstairs on Stadium ice Sunday night, the Blackhawks’ star of stars found freedom among the press.
For an entire game, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim had been the pushiest of guests. The Hawks didn’t have to go to Disneyland. Disneyland came to them. The Mighty Ducks clutched and grabbed, bumped and scraped, hung on and held off, and generally made nuisances of themselves.
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“They look like us,” noticed Roenick.
He couldn’t have been more correct, and the Hawks couldn’t have handled the situation better. They won 2-0 and yes, it was ugly. The fans booed after 40 minutes of pointlessness, which is their privilege. At those prices, tight checking isn’t always great theater. That’s really why owner Bill Wirtz doesn’t like the Hawks on TV. Because their style is made for radio. But better to win ugly than lose stupid, right?
“Defense,” said captain Dirk Graham. “It’s a tough sell.”
It is indeed. Especially after last season. The Hawks perspired for 84 games and compiled 106 points, most in their Clarence Campbell Conference and the third-highest total in the National Hockey League. They yielded only 230 goals, best in the league. And yet, with Stanley Cup fever rampant throughout Chicago, the Hawks caught a cold during the playoffs and were eliminated in four straight games by St. Louis.
“We came up short,” recalled Graham, “on offense.”
So what do the Hawks do for an encore? Exactly what they have to do. Start over again, with the same philosophy. If the system dictates that 84 nights of hard labor don’t really matter when the second season arrives, then you throw out the playoff pratfall, too. You don’t forgive, but you have to forget. You play six months to achieve a home-ice advantage that can vanish in 60 minutes, but you move on. Nobody died, although the perception existed that the Hawks would fizzle this winter.
“It did seem to be out there, this feeling that we wouldn’t be a very good team,” Graham said. “Myself, I wasn’t worried. I was more curious than anything.”
Well, so far, so good. The Hawks do not enjoy the high profile of other professional teams in this city, but a funny thing happened to the Hawks on their way from the Stadium to the United Center. They didn’t lie down on Madison Street and get run over. Like the Bulls without Michael Jordan, the Hawks have refused to close up shop. The old building may rock again this spring, just when it was supposed to go dark. Remember the Roar?
“We’re younger and faster than last season,” said Graham. “Whether we’ll be better, only time will tell.”
Even after Tuesday night’s breakdown at Detroit, where the Hawks were whipped 5-1, they are 12-4-2 in their last 18 games. Their defensive record sparkles, in no small part because of an excellent goaltending tandem: Ed Belfour and Jeff Hackett. The Hawks are still 11 points behind first-place Toronto in the Central Division, but the Hawks have played four fewer games on an NHL schedule too strange to be excused.
The Hawks played 12 of their first 16 games at home. Then they disappeared. Sunday’s Stadium game was their second in 35 days with a lot of dead time on the road in between. Now it’s 16 games in 29 days. The worst ever, says veteran Chris Chelios, and it’s not only because of circuses and concerts in the Stadium.
“A freak, partly because the expansion (to Anaheim and Florida) was granted so late,” said General Manager Bob Pulford. “What bothers me more is this. From now until April, we have 11 instances of back-to-back games in which the team we play on the second night won’t play the night before. That’s a competitive disadvantage. We used to be able to approve our schedule. Now it goes into a computer. It’s not like the old days.”
But the Hawks are playing the old-fashioned way. They’re working again and it’s working again. On most nights, anyway. Scratch Tuesday.