The Blackhawks opened the season with low expectations and equally low fan interest. Though they’d made the Stanley Cup playoffs last spring for the first time in five years, they gave up their most popular player, Tony Amonte, to free agency over the summer and signed in his place Theo Fleury, a veteran star with addiction issues. Fleury went AWOL from practice before the season even began, and almost immediately afterward was suspended by the NHL for violating the terms of his substance-abuse program. In addition, the team’s top remaining offensive threat, Eric Daze, who was coming off back-to-back 30-goal seasons, went down with back surgery in September, which meant the Hawks had to go without their two best players for the first month and a half of the season. Fans responded with apathy. Attendance typically failed to crack 13,000, and beat writers speculated that for at least one game there probably weren’t 10,000 people in the United Center, no matter what the announced attendance.
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The Hawks responded with a terrific game against the Washington Capitals. Daze’s season debut, the game was full of end-to-end action and reversals in momentum. There was even a penalty shot. Noticeably lacking in cheap penalties and other stoppages, it burned along in just over two and a half hours, a scoreless overtime included, and the tie didn’t seem to diminish it in anyone’s eyes. “It was a fun game,” Sutter said afterward. “It was old-fashioned hockey.”
Sutter showed his confidence in the line by starting it in the first and second periods. He immediately teamed Daze with old mates Alexei Zhamnov and Steve Sullivan, and he frequently put them on the ice opposite the Caps’ top line of Robert Lang, Kip Miller, and Jaromir Jagr, the dangerous right wing who made his reputation playing Scottie Pippen to Mario Lemieux’s Michael Jordan on the great Pittsburgh Penguins teams of a decade ago (including the 1992 squad that swept the Hawks in their last trip to the Stanley Cup finals). The teams’ top two lines played each other evenly for the most part, which had to be considered a victory for the Hawks.
Tension built throughout the third period. I saw a guy in a huge red-feathered headdress with black-and-white stripes sitting in the mezzanine, and the Hawks-approved drum corps popped up here and there to beat out a tribal rhythm before face-offs. In this age of scoreboard-dictated cheers, spontaneous chants of “Let’s go Hawks!” kept breaking out in the upper balcony. With about five minutes left, the Caps took advantage of a Chicago line change to get an open shot on Thibault, but it clanged off the crossbar. The Hawks immediately turned the play the other way and got a shot on goal that rebounded high in front of the net. But a Washington defenseman swatted it clear. Moments later, Zhamnov worked a nice 2-on-1 with Sullivan, sliding the puck across the crease, but Sullivan couldn’t deflect it in.
Holy smokes, indeed. It was the best Chicago sports event I’d seen all year, and the Hawks went on to win Sunday against the Nashville Predators, sending them off on their annual November make-way-for-the-circus road trip at 9-5-3. Somehow, this was consistent. After the Cubs, White Sox, and Bears had all squandered high expectations, it only figured that the Blackhawks should defy doubts by emerging better than they were last season. It’s as simple as ABC.
