Dreaming of a Clean Sheet of Blackhawks Ice at the Height of Summer

Tommie Lee
Jul 29, 2015
3 min read

Okay. Break time is over. At least for me. Time to embrace the puck madness again. Some of us are so puckmad that we STILL think about The Hockey when the mercury is in the 90s.

Welcome back to The Madhouse.

For the Blackhawks, it’s still a time of decompression. Brad Richards had his day with Lord Stanley’s Cup in the tiny hamlet of Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island earlier this week. Before that we were seeing reports from some of the kids at prospect camp that we should be remembering the names of (I’m talking about YOU, Marko Dano.) The words “Four sounds better than three,” in the confident voice of Jonathon Toews in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans, still echo in our heads.

A lot has changed since the parade and rally at Soldier Field. A few of the faces that waved to the crowd are gone now. Patrick Sharp led an exodus to the division rival Dallas Blackhawks Stars that included top D prospect and Pennsylvanian Sensation Stephen Johns…a guy we have put a LOT of developmental time and effort into. The Dallas Blackhawks Stars also snagged Johnny Oduya as an unrestricted free agent, and former Blackhawks tender Antti Niemi, he of the “Niemi No-No”, a cornerstone of the 2010 Cup team. That’s a lot of Chicago rings on Dallas fingers. The Stars are loaded for bear heading into the new season. It was obvious from the beginning of the season that Sharp was leaving, but defecting to Dallas pours salt into an already open wound.

We fans knew change was coming, and plenty of it. The salary cap does not allow you to keep all of your chess pieces. The Cap is far too good of an opponent for that. But allowing so many of our players to go to a team in our division is a ridiculous mistake, one that I expect will cost us dearly in the coming campaign. Honestly, I can still barely control my anger about the Chicago/Dallas situation weeks later, sitting here and typing this. Also gone: Brandon Saad, which hurts. He went to a team in Columbus that offers him a great place to continue to grow and become a lethal weapon. In return we got the aforementioned Dano and Artem Anisimov, a big Russian Bear of a center who used to skate with Lokomotiv of the KHL, shortly before the tragic plane crash that killed the team at the beginning of their season several years ago. At that point, Anisimov was in New York skating for the Rangers. Lokomotiv is also his hometown team, which made the tragedy twice as difficult for him. Anisimov is only 27 and will skate with two other Russian faces in Blackhawks red: forward Artemi Panarin and forward Viktor Tikhonov. The new face of Chicago likes to write in Cyrillic letters, it seems.

Our consolation prizes from Dallas, by the way, are a scant value compared to what we gave up. Sharp and Johns for Defenseman Trevor Daley and Center Ryan Garbutt. We’re wafer-thin on D, so Daley will have to step up in a huge way, probably top 4. I don’t know that his numbers suggest him capable of this. Garbutt is a 4th line lunk who seems likely to have the same impact tofu has on my grocery list.

Andrew Desjardins, who roared to life in the postseason, has decided to stick around. That’s cool. I liked what I saw from the Frenchman. David Rundblad has signed back on, and the Pavlov’s dog known as Trevor van Riemsdyk help us shore up the blue line a bit. But anything goes, at this point.

What I know for sure is this: NONE of the experts say Chicago is likely to return to the Stanley Cup Final in 2016. I also know that I disagree. We don’t have the same team, but we have a lot of potential to wreak a bit of havok come October.

And these Blackhawks just looooooove to prove the experts wrong.

Go Hawks!