Blackhawks need to finally turn the corner before Chicago turns its back (2025)

CHICAGO — Connor Bedard darted down the left side of the ice, got a defender to bite with a little head fake, then sent a deft pass across the slot to a hard-charging Tyler Bertuzzi, who banged the puck home with ease on one knee before playfully sliding into the boards in mild celebration. It was just the first day of Blackhawks training camp, but already the new-look first line was clicking — a promise of things to come, a sign of hope, a sign of life.

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Forty-three fans were there to see it. Nobody cheered.

Nothing terribly unusual about that. It was a Thursday morning —adults have work, kids have school, people have lives. And it was just a practice drill, 19 days before the real games begin.

Of course, camp opened on a Thursday last year, too. And every square inch of Fifth Third Arena’s bleachers was occupied. Fans lined up outside to get in. The Blackhawks had to institute a mobile ticketing system for a practice that was free to attend. There were makeshift kiosks selling No. 98 jerseys and No. 98 shirseys and No. 98 hoodies. There were No. 98 sweaters dotting the crowd —Blackhawks ones, Team Canada ones, a Regina Pats one. Kids just a few years younger than Bedard lost their minds screaming out his name, begging him for a stick, for a puck, for a moment of eye contact they’d never forget. Heck, the weekend coffee shop inside the rink was open. On a weekday. That’s when you know it’s a big deal.

Bedard was there this time around, too. But there were more reporters and team staffers standing atop the bleachers than fans sitting in them.

Two straight seasons of organizational tanking, following a handful of seasons of organizational incompetence, have taken their toll. Long-term hope remains high, with general manager Kyle Davidson stockpiling blue-chip prospects with a bevy of early-round draft picks. Ticket sales remain strong, as Chicago’s reawakened hockey fans refuse to sink back into dormancy. And the city’s love affair with Bedard undoubtedly will rage for years and years to come.

But the novelty is wearing off, and the losses have been piling up. Beyond the 20,000 fans who show up at the United Center every night, is Chicago still watching? Still caring? Still invested, emotionally and financially? It surely helps the Blackhawks’ city-wide standing that the Cubs are mediocre, the Bulls are going nowhere slowly, the Sky are rebuilding and the White Sox are historically awful (the Bears exist on a different plane than any of these teams). But eventually, a team fades into obscurity, even irrelevance. The worst thing a fan base can be is indifferent, and more than nine years after they last won a real playoff series — the 2015 Stanley Cup Final that capped a six-year run during which the Blackhawks flat-out ran this town — and still at least a few years away from true contention, the city might be teetering on the brink of apathy.

Captain Nick Foligno and alternates Seth Jones and Connor Murphy. pic.twitter.com/wvBqg8QB0Z

— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) September 19, 2024

And so for the first time since perhaps the fall of 2017, after a first-round sweep by Nashville and the knee-jerk trades of Artemi Panarin and Niklas Hjalmarsson dramatically raised the temperature in the United Center, there’s real pressure on these Blackhawks. Not to win a championship; nobody expects that. Not even to make the playoffs, which remains a very long shot.

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No, there’s pressure to be simply competitive. To be watchable. To look like a real NHL team again. To stay relevant in an increasingly crowded sports marketplace. To, at long last, turn the corner and start moving toward that brilliant future we keep hearing about.

There’s pressure on Bedard to take that next step toward megastardom. There were 17 40-goal scorers in the league last year, nine 100-point players. Seems like every team has at least one superstar these days. Bedard is expected to push his way closer to that company, if not the head of it, and he needs to do so while becoming a multi-dimensional player who can be trusted in the defensive zone the way he can be trusted in the offensive zone. He was sensational as a rookie. He needs to be even better.

There’s pressure on third-year coach Luke Richardson to show he can install a real system, with real structure, now that he has a team full of real NHL players. The Blackhawks have played ragged hockey at both ends of the rink for two years under Richardson, but it was easy to write off given the roster’s youth, lack of experience and overall talent level. But with Tyler Bertuzzi, Teuvo Teräväinen, Pat Maroon, Craig Smith, Ilya Mikheyev, T.J. Brodie, Alec Martinez, Laurent Brossoit and a healthy Taylor Hall added to the mix, there are no more excuses. Richardson has earned well-deserved plaudits for keeping the mood light and the effort high in his first two seasons. But he’ll have to show he can coach hockey in his third. That seriousness of purpose was palpable on Day 1 of camp, as the Blackhawks opened not with drills but with a spirited scrimmage. Richardson didn’t even participate in the end-of-practice conditioning drills, something that had been a fun tradition in the past.

“You don’t need a clown coach skating around in a tracksuit doing a few laps when he didn’t do anything before, where they all worked for an hour before,” Richardson said. “It’s all business this year.”

There’s pressure on Davidson, who is still drawing flak from fans for cutting ties with Patrick Kane. No disrespect to the likes of Hall, Bertuzzi or Teräväinen, but it’s still hard to imagine a better fit on Bedard’s wing than Kane, who looked a lot like his old self last year in Detroit after hip-resurfacing surgery. Davidson has gotten a longer leash from both management and fans than any GM this side of Steve Yzerman, but he knew he couldn’t play the rebuilding card forever. This team is built to be significantly better than the last two. It had better be.

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“We’ve built a big hole the last few years in what we lack, and where we’re standing in the league,” Connor Murphy said. “So we have a lot of work to come together as a new group. Even if you have some skill, it doesn’t mean much if you don’t put it together and use it the right way in games to get wins.”

There’s pressure on new captain Nick Foligno to bring this patchwork team of veterans and youngsters together in a hurry. If any player is up to the challenge, it’s Foligno, who’s been the de facto captain of this team since the moment he was acquired last summer. But replacing Jonathan Toews, perhaps the most revered Blackhawks player of them all, doesn’t make things any easier. The “C” doesn’t always mean a lot, but it sure does in Chicago.

“We’re going to have this standard that’s expected to be met each and every day,” Foligno said. “There’s no dipping below that. And if you do, you’re going to hear about it.”

And there’s pressure on ownership, which has yet to share many details about the new television home for the Blackhawks (and White Sox and Bulls), the Chicago Sports Network. As of this writing, all we have is a design-less website straight out of the 1990s which includes lengthy details on how to purchase and install an antenna straight out of the 1960s. Eleven days before the launch, we don’t know if the channel will be carried by Xfinity or YouTubeTV, only DirecTV and “over the air.” Fans are understandably alarmed. Skeptical, too. NBC Sports Chicago produced a high-quality broadcast that was easily findable. Will CHSN? Making games free to watch is terrific. Making games easy to watch is more important. The Blackhawks and their partners have to get this right.

This team has asked an awful lot of its fans over the last handful of years, on and off the ice. And the fans have been more gracious and more invested than anyone in the C-suite could have ever hoped for. But there’s a fine line between being patient and tuning out completely. It’s time for the Blackhawks — as a team, not just one individual — to grab Chicago’s attention again.

For the first time in a long time, it feels like there’s a lot riding on this Blackhawks season. That’s a blessing because it means people care. It’s a curse because it means they might not for long.

(Photo of Connor Bedard interacting with fans: James Guillory / USA Today)

Blackhawks need to finally turn the corner before Chicago turns its back (1)Blackhawks need to finally turn the corner before Chicago turns its back (2)

Mark Lazerus is a senior NHL writer for The Athletic based out of Chicago. He has covered the Blackhawks for 11 seasons for The Athletic and the Chicago Sun-Times after covering Notre Dame’s run to the BCS championship game in 2012-13. Before that, he was the sports editor of the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkLazerus

Blackhawks need to finally turn the corner before Chicago turns its back (2025)
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