They said it could be a preview of the 2014 Stanley Cup Final.
If so, Saturday night’s blizzard-marred outdoor contest at Chicago’s historic Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears for the best part of a century, surely puts the home town Blackhawks in the box seat. Of course, plenty can happen between now and spring – the playoffs are notorious for producing shock results – but Chicago’s 5-1 victory against Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins was impressive.
You know what, I’ll go ahead here and call it what it really was: this was a dismantling by Chicago of a very good Penguins team, perhaps the very best in the East. And, on the shores of Lake Michigan he ‘Hawks dispatched them without, it seemed, breaking a sweat. It was Hockey 101, a master-class. The much-hyped first ever NHL match-up between two of the league’s most marketable stars, Crosby and Blackhawk captain Jonathan Toews was all about Chicago’s #19.
As an aside, it’s quite unbelievable that Crosby and Toews, who have skated nearly a thousand combined times in pre-season, All-Star and regular season National Hockey League games, and have twice been Olympic gold medal-winning team mates, have never faced one another in an NHL arena. Well, technically, they still haven’t, but their first outing as foes will certainly go down in the annals of league history – though it will be a night Pittsburgh’s players and fans would doubtless prefer to forget.
If Saturday night’s game had been a title fight, all the headlines would be about a TKO. Two goals and an assist later for Toews, and Twitter came alight, with so many – admittedly, Chicago-based – social media pundits about how Toews has always been better than Crosby, and how he will always be better than Crosby. You know, the sort of balanced analysis that you can only get from parochial hometown fans!
Actually, Toews was pretty damn good on Saturday night. He picked a nice night – national television audience during a terrific outdoor game against one of the league’s other marquee stars – to play perhaps his best game of the season. There’s nothing like watching a player dominate on the ice. It’s better, of course, when there’s upwards of sixty-two-thousand people cheering him on.
Speaking of attendance, you’d have to say that the inaugural Stadium Series, which culminated in Chicago, has been a roaring success. More than two hundred thousand fans – 54,099 in Los Angeles, a two-game combined 100,132 at Yankee Stadium and 62,921 more in Soldier Field – walked into some of America’s biggest stadiums, and surely the NHL bean counters are smiling.
Chicago’s front office surely is. Based on their showing outdoors in Soldier Field, the ‘Hawks are poised for a deep run into spring, and perhaps even a return trip to hockey’s promised land, the Stanley Cup Final. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’ll clinch back-to-back championships, which is not an easy thing to do in this day and age of tightly-controlled salary caps and the like.
Why, though? Because Chicago are the very definition of the word ‘team’. They can ice four great offensive lines, have three solid defensive pairings and two good goalies. Sometimes, you can’t see where that offensive spark or big-time defensive play is going to come from, and that’s why they’re so lethal.
Key to their sustained success is that one-in-all-in mentality. Remember their Stanley Cup runs of 2010 and 2013? It was unsung guys like Dave Bolland, Dustin Byfuglien, role players who became heroes (and were promptly traded away, but that’s another story entirely). It’s a good illustration of how things operate at United Centre: it isn't always about Toews or Patrick Kane or Marian Hossa.
The Blackhawks don’t rely on a few superstars to carry the team along on their lonesome, but when one of those guys are on song, Chicago are scary-good. There’s a great bond amongst this team. It isn't a bunch of guys single-handedly after glory. It’s a tight, well-drilled unit, and their coach, Joel Quenneville, must be given the lion’s share of credit for the culture he has built in Chicago. Their locker room would surely be the envy
If this was a preview of the 2014 Stanley Cup Final, then, after Saturday night’s memorable occasion at historic Soldier Field on the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago’s legion of fans should be quietly confident, whereas Pittsburgh supporters have plenty of things to occupy their mind.
At least, if the Blackhawks and Penguins do happen to face off for the honour of hoisting Lord Stanley in the spring, they will not have to deal with the blizzard conditions that turned the game on it’s head on Saturday night. Of all the outdoor games, this was the most difficult – worse than Buffalo on New Year’s Day in 2008 and worse than at Michigan Stadium this year – for the lake-affect snow was both heavy and insistent, falling for the entire duration of the game.
The scenes made for great television pictures, exactly the sort of thing that the NHL and host broadcaster NBC would’ve loved, for there’s nothing like snow during a hockey game to reel in people channel-surfing for something to watch. Of course, the conditions weren’t so ideal for the guys on the ice.
Nor were they ideal for the folks in the grandstands, for that matter. A tip of the hat to the fans. No one left until after the final siren on Saturday night, despite being half-buried in snow.
It was a testament to the skill of the players out there that the game didn’t really suffer because of the inclement weather. If you ever wanted to know just how good National Hockey League-calibre players are, watch them put on a game during a driving snowstorm, with winds howling up and down the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Then, you’ll know. They’re the best in the world. And the Blackhawks might be the best of them all at the moment.
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