Nine years ago the Blackhawks lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup finals. Dominik Hasek made his only appearance of the championship series in goal for the Hawks when he relieved Ed Belfour in the first period of the fourth and final game.
Although that was the Penguins’ last Stanley Cup, they have succeeded in making it back to the playoffs every year and the two superstars of that second straight championship season, Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, will be in the forefront of their current quest.As for the Hawks, they have missed the playoffs for the fourth straight season. The 1992 Stanley Cup finalists have fallen so far they tied with the new expansion franchise in Columbus for last place in the Central Division.
What made the Hawks what they are today?
Bad trades. Bad decisions. Bad drafts. Bad luck.
Coach Mike Keenan deserves the credit for goading and tongue-lashing the Hawks to the finals nine years ago.
General Manager Mike Keenan deserves the blame for trading Hasek to the Buffalo Sabres two months later. Unless Eric Daze turns into a superstar, the deal will be among the worst in Hawks history.
Hasek went on to become the world’s best goaltender of the 1990s, a five-time Vezina Trophy winner and the hero of the Czech Republic’s 1998 Olympic gold medal campaign.
In return for Hasek, Keenan received goalie Stephane Beauregard and a fourth-round draft choice. Three days later, he traded Beauregard to Winnipeg for Christian Ruuttu–giving up nothing and getting next to nothing. Fortunately for the Hawks, the fourth-round draft selection was Daze, who has kept the Hasek trade from being an unadulterated disaster.
The reason Keenan traded Hasek is because at the time the Hawks had perhaps the NHL’s best goalie in Belfour. But Belfour was and has remained temperamental and a headache for management. So, in January, 1997, Keenan’s predecessor and successor as GM, Bob Pulford, got rid of the headache by trading him to San Jose. The three players Pulford received in return played a grand total of 58 games for the Hawks.
Hasek in Buffalo and Belfour, who went to Dallas as a free agent in the summer of 1997, remain two of the game’s finest goaltenders. If either had remained with the Hawks it can be argued that they had the ability to make an increasingly bad team look halfway decent in the standings the way Tony Esposito did in the mid-1970s when his brilliant goaltending kept a ramshackle team from collapsing.
A headache isn’t as bad as a heart ailment, which is what Alpo Suhonen was diagnosed with late last month when the Hawks hierarchy relieved him of his coaching duties with seven games remaining in his first season on the job.
When Keenan quit coaching to become the Hawks’ GM, his successor behind the bench was Darryl Sutter. Sutter’s resume included stints as a minor-league coach of the Hawks’ farm teams in Saginaw, Mich., and Indianapolis, as an assistant coach and as Keenan’s associate coach. He was prepared well to assume command.
But after three seasons–successful by today’s standards but not as sensational as Keenan’s reign–in June of 1995, Sutter announced he was resigning to focus his attention on the care of a young son who has Down’s syndrome.
For the Hawks, the loss of Sutter was a stroke of bad luck.
Sutter returned to coaching with the San Jose Sharks in 1997 and has taken them to the playoffs for four straight seasons. During this span the Hawks have had four head coaches–Craig Hartsburg, Dirk Graham, Lorne Molleken and Suhonen–an interim coach (Pulford) and an acting coach (Denis Savard). But they haven’t had a team in the playoffs.
In fairness to the coaches, the teams with which they had to work didn’t have a wealth of human resources.
The three great hockey dynasties of the last 30 years–the Montreal Canadiens, New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers–all were built on draft choices. In contrast, the team Keenan took to the 1992 Stanley Cup finals was put together in large part by his wheeling and dealing. However, there were a handful of noteworthy homegrown players, the most notable being Jeremy Roenick, Steve Larmer and Belfour, who had signed as a free agent after a year of college hockey at North Dakota.
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During the 1990s the continuing expansion of the NHL has increased the importance of making good draft choices.
Unfortunately for the Hawks, they have had many bad drafts. Only nine of their 20 selections in the first and second rounds from 1990-99 are playing in the NHL.
Only three of the players who made the trip to Columbus for Sunday’s final game of the season were drafted by the Hawks and have spent their entire careers in Chicago. Daze was chosen in the fourth round in 1993; Jean-Yves Leroux in the second round in 1994; and Steve McCarthy, in the first round in 1999 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
A look at the Pittsburgh roster puts the Hawks’ draft problems in perspective. Lemieux and Jagr, who were first-round selections in 1984 and 1990, are joined by seven other Penguins draftees, three of whom were first-round picks. In addition, Martin Straka, who was their first-round choice in 1992, was signed as a free agent in August, 1997, after being traded in April, 1995, and subsequently playing for three other NHL teams.
The last impact player to come to the Hawks from the first three rounds of the draft was Roenick, their first choice and the eighth overall selection in 1988.
Although Pulford’s 1996 trade that sent Roenick to Phoenix for Alex Zhamnov has been criticized, it actually would have been a good deal if the Hawks had been able to parlay the 1997 first-round draft choice they received into a star player. But the player they took 16th overall, right wing Ty Jones, has spent the last two seasons as a non-entity in the minors.
When the Hawks got off to a poor start last season, the scapegoat became Bob Murray, who was less than halfway through his third season as general manager.
“Murray had no authority,” said a member of his former front office peer group on another team. “It was decision by committee–he had to run everything by Pulford and [owner] Bill Wirtz. He always would have to get back to you.”
However, before being forced out, Murray did make two of the Hawks’ best personnel moves in the last nine years when he snared right wing Steve Sullivan on waivers from Toronto on Oct. 23, 1999, and acquired center Michael Nylander from Tampa Bay for Bryan Muir and Reid Simpson on Nov. 12, 1999. It was also during Murray’s watch that the Hawks signed free-agent center Chris Herperger on Sept. 2, 1998 and drafted McCarthy, the defenseman many consider to be a star of the future, in the first round in 1999.
Since taking charge of the front office in the wake of Murray’s departure, Mike Smith has overhauled the scouting staff and stockpiled draft choices.
Unfortunately, like his predecessors, Smith also has made some mistakes. The most glaring are getting rid of 50-point scorer Jean-Pierre Dumont for next to nothing in return and signing free agent Valeri Zelepukin, who quickly turned into a $1.2 million minor-leaguer. Although Suhonen’s coaching helped make some of the Hawks more skillful players, the team fell apart in the last month and the bottom line is a record worse than last season’s.
Discontented Hawks fans want a quick fix next season. Judging from the Western Conference standings, making the playoffs would entail improving by 20 points. For that to happen, a team that going back to the early 1990s has a legacy of bad trades, bad decisions and bad drafts suddenly will need a lot of good luck.
A franchise in decline
Tribune hockey reporter Neil Milbert takes a look at some of the trades and draft decisions that have contributed to the demise of the Blackhawks in the 1990s.
BAD DEALS
Aug. 7, 1992:
Facing the possibility of losing goaltender Dominik Hasek in expansion draft, the Hawks sent him to Buffalo for Stephane Beauregard and fourth-round pick in the 1993 draft (Eric Daze).
Comment: Daze this season has become one of the Hawks’ best players, but during the last decade Hasek became the game’s greatest goaltender.
Jan. 25, 1997:
Goaltender Ed Belfour wanted more money than the Hawks were willing to pay, so he was traded to San Jose for Chris Terreri, Michal Sykora and Ulf Dahlen.
Comment: Belfour, who went from San Jose to Dallas as a free agent that summer, has gone on to wina a Stanley Cup and record 26 shutouts in the last four seasons. Dahlen played only 30 games for the Hawks, then went to Sweden to play for two years. Washington signed Dahlen as a free agent in the summer of 1999, and he’s now the Capitals’ fourth biggest point-producer.
March 4, 1998:
Defenseman Keith Carney was traded to Phoenix with Jim Cummings for Chad Kilger and Jason More.
Comment: Carney this season has a plus/minus rating of +15 for the Coyotes. No Hawks defenseman comes close to that.
March 10, 2000:
Center Doug Gilmour and winger Jean-Pierre Dumont were traded to Buffalo for Michal Grosek.
Comment: Gilmour is at the end of the road, but Dumont has blossomed into one of Buffalo’s best young players. As for Grosek, he was packaged with Brad Brown and traded to the Rangers for future considerations. Another negative, the Hawks are paying half of Gilmour’s $6 million salary.
BAD DECISIONS
June 29, 1998:
Dirk Graham was hired to replace the fired Craig Hartsburg as head coach.
Comment: Graham’s coaching experience consisted of one year as Hartsburg’s assistant. On-the-job training turned into a fiasco.
July 18, 2000:
Free agent winger Valeri Zelepukin signed a $1.2 million contract with the Hawks.
Comment: After getting only three goals and four assists in 36 games for the Hawks, Zelepukin was farmed out to Norfolk where he has eight goals and seven assists in 26 games.
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BAD DRAFTS
1992:
The Hawks made Sergei Krivokrasov their first selection and the 12th player taken overall in the draft.
Comment: They could have had Valeri Bure, Michael Peca, or Martin Straka.
1993:
The Hawks picked Eric Lecompte in the first round and Eric Manlow in the second round.
Comment: Neither player has made the grade in the NHL.
In the Aug. 16, 1996, trade that sent Jeremy Roenick to Phoenix for Alex Zhamnov and Craig Mills, the Hawks also received a first-round pick in the 1997 draft.
Comment: It would have been a good trade if the Hawks had used their draft selection to snare Brenden Morrow, a left wing who is a key player for Dallas. Instead, they picked Ty Jones, a right wing who this year has 11 goals and 17 assists in 62 games down on the farm in Norfolk.
baiduhai.
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Hawks Win Stanley Cup; Beat Detroit, 1-0: That was the Tribune’s headline on April 11, 1934, as the Hawks won their first Stanley Cup. Go back in time and read the Tribune’s coverage from that historic event at www.chicagosports.com/go/34cup