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player ready...Jeremy Roenick will be 24 next week, no age for him to be worrying whether he’ll still be in a funk next week, too.
“Something is bothering me,” says the Blackhawks’ star center. If that statement sounds coy, it’s not intended as such, because the puzzle is his. A hidden agenda can be identified, a lot quicker than answers to hard questions asked of oneself.
“I don’t know what it is,” he says. “I used to feel I couldn’t wait to get to the rink, because I was excited about our chances of winning. But now I feel if the other team shuts Joe Murphy and me down and we don’t play perfect defense, there’s a good chance we’re not going to win.”
The Hawks haven’t been winning or scoring much lately. On any given night, they look like the Bears on skates. In Sunday’s 4-2 loss to Edmonton, the Hawks’ fifth in seven outings, they might as well have been passing a medicine ball instead of a puck, so fractured was the attack. Roenick carries the weight of this imbalanced and inept offense on his shoulders, and the right one hurts as if separated.
“I don’t mind the pain, though,” he says. “And I love to hit. But I love to do everything out there, and that’s where I get frustrated. I’d like to get 160 points a season, and if that sounds selfish, I don’t mean it that way. I want to play both ends of the ice, too, and playing in Chicago has taught me how important that is. I want to be the best defensive player possible, too. But can I get 160 points in this system? How much longer can my body play this system? I don’t know.”
The Hawks play hockey the old-fashioned way. They earn every stride, and if that means you wind up with your nose pressed against the glass, so be it. You bump, bang, and bump some more, and if you’re 185 pounds wringing wet like Roenick, you hit or sit. It is a plan that discourages creativity, the problem there being that other franchises mix soldiers and soloists and it works, too, sometimes well enough for a Stanley Cup.
“Yeah, I think every once in a while what it would be like in Pittsburgh,” Roenick says. “Bigger ice, more wide-open style. But that’s not what this is all about. That’s where I get myself into trouble. I talk about maybe having to explore free agency someday, and people take it to mean I want out, or that I want to get traded. That’s not it at all. I love it here, too much not to put up with all the other stuff.”
There is a lot of other stuff. After Sunday night’s loss, coach Darryl Sutter rearranged some furniture and stormed out, leaving players to meet among themselves. Roenick has been benched on occasion by Sutter, the charge being that Roenick wasn’t ready to compete. Then again, what is preparation when you’ve got opponents hanging onto either sleeve at every move?
“Darryl sometimes does what he tells us not to do,” Roenick says. “He gets real high when we win, gets real down when we lose. But I’m not sure that’s even a problem. I respect him. I just want to keep getting better, to make us better and hockey better. I don’t like seeing high school football scores on the 10 o’clock news before the Blackhawks. Is it bad to be flashy?”
In the end, though, show biz is most biz. Roenick, who signed a five-year contract before the salaries exploded, is underpaid on a team that, for all its estimable worth, ranks below the middle of the NHL pack. Roenick will live with his deal not only because it’s the honorable thing to do, but also because he might have no choice. Still, Roenick, a high-energy sort, mingles with the masses.
“I hear people say they haven’t followed the Blackhawks since Bobby Hull left,” Roenick says. “That hurts.” Then he wonders, why did Bobby Hull leave? And why did so many others follow? Do the Hawks want stars, or do the Hawks want everybody to wear equal stripes? Roenick would like to step forward, but he’s being tightly checked. What did they say about Dean Smith, the North Carolina coach? Only he could keep Michael Jordan under 20 points.