Chicagoist's Top Stories Of 2013: Blackhawks Win The Stanley Cup
By Chuck Sudo in News on Dec 23, 2013 8:30PM
2013 was a year Chicago sports fans would rather forget. The Bulls gutted their way through the regular season and playoffs while Derrick Rose sat out the season rehabbing a knee injury (then was lost for the remainder of the 2013-14 season with another knee injury). The Cubs and White Sox each lost over 90 game games and made summer in Chicago trudge along slowly while waiting for the Bears to begin training camp. Based on last night’s performance, the Bears will finish the season on the outside of the playoff picture and hopes for an extended, miraculous Super Bowl run are pipe dreams.
Then there were the Blackhawks, who weren’t expected to do much in a 2013 season shortened by a lockout. Instead, they got off to record-setting points streak to start a season, captured their second Stanley Cup in four years and showed how the National Hockey League how to re-tool a team on the fly in the league’s new salary cap era.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Yet team president John McDonough and general manager Stan Bowman had a plan in place to lock down the Blackhawks’ core players—Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Patrick Sharp; Marian Hossa, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook—early and build around them with coach Joel Quennville’s puck possession game in place.
And build they did. Veterans such as Johnny Oduya, Michal Roszival, Michal Handzus and Ray Emery and talented youngsters like Andrew Shaw, Marcus Kruger, Niklas Hjalmarsson, Corey Crawford, Brandon Pirri and Brandon Bollig meshed with the team’s core to get a quick start out of the gate and put together a 24-game streak where they earned at least a point. The team had its stumbles after but managed to regroup and find its bearings again just as the Stanley Cup playoffs began.
The Hawks entered the playoffs with a 36-7-5 record. Their 79 points easily the most in the league, leading some fans to fear the dreaded “President’s Trophy” curse. When the Hawks fell into a 3-1 hole against the rival Detroit Red Wings in their Western Conference semifinal it looked as though the Hawks would be paper tigers. But they roared back and won the series in seven games, the final game being an overtime thriller.
The road to the Stanley Cup didn’t get easier as the Hawks drew the defending champion Los Angeles Kings and their All-World goaltender Jonathan Quick in the Western Conference Finals. Many experts predicted a Kings series win and a matchup against Boston and goalie Tuukka Rask. But the Hawks—Crawford in particular—had other ideas.
The much-maligned goaltender rose to the occasion and was clearly the better man between the pipes against Quick as the Hawks punched their ticket to the finals with a 4-1 series win. Game 5 was an emphatic statement with Patrick Kane scoring a hat trick as the Hawks punched their ticket to the Finals.
Crawford was even more stalwart in goal matched against Rask in the finals, even as the Bruins began to target his glove side while on offense. He may have given up some easy goals but when he was needed, Crawford delivered. No game was more evident than in Game 6, with the Bruins holding a 2-1 lead and looking to force a deciding seventh game. That’s when the quick strike Blackhawks stunned the TD Garden with two goals in 17 seconds against Rask and sending bros to Wicker Park and Wrigleyville in droves to celebrate.
Patrick Kane won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff’s most valuable player but the nod should have gone to Crawford, who sported a 1.84 goals against average and saved 93.2 percent of his shots faced in the playoffs. Even Kane admitted Crawford should have been hoisting the Conn Smythe in front of 2 million people downtown.
Crawford was all, “fucking right Chicago!!!
The Hawks rewarded Crawford with a long-term extension and also signed other playoff contributors like Andrew Shaw and Bryan Bickell to extensions in a show of faith by Bowman and McDonough. The Hawks partied like champions once again with the Stanley Cup being bandied about everywhere like the original wingman it is. Unlike 2010, however, the Hawks haven't had a hangover and currently sport the second best record in the league.