February 9, 2009 Blackhawks lobbying for
All-Star Game
[CHICAGO, IL] -- The Blackhawks sent
five players to the All-Star Weekend in Montreal: Jonathan Toews,
Patrick Kane and Brian Campbell to the Big Game, Kris Versteeg and
Dave Bolland to the YoungStars game.
But the Hawks other All-Stars were in Montreal as well.
The Hawks sent hordes of their front
office staff to the weekend, and they are the ones who have helped the
team penetrate the public consciousness in Chicago over the last 15
months. Success on the ice is one nice story. But the success off the
ice is an even better story. And it's one the Hawks continue to write.
These front-office people were not in Quebec to party. Well, not JUST
to party, anyway.
See, the thing about the new
Blackhawks is that their braintrust is always working, always
thinking, always moving. They don't just want to win, they want to win
the right way. They don't just want to succeed, they want to attain a
platform of excellence, and to bring all the other teams up on that
platform with them.
I happened to return from the All-Star weekend in Montreal to Chicago
on the same flight with not only the Blackhawks' three All-Star
players and assorted media members (All-Stars in their own right), but
also with Blackhawks' President John McDonough and Vice President of
Business Operations Jay Blunk.
While Kane caught z's in the seat in
front of me -- understandable, since the Versus party lasted until
nearly five in the morning -- McDonough and Blunk stood in the
bulkhead having an animated strategic session for most of the two hour
flight.
Let's backtrack. The reason the Hawks sent so many people to Montreal
-- from departments as varied as marketing, community relations and
game operations -- was to listen. Having just hosted a successful
Winter Classic, and having launched several successful innovations,
McDonough and Blunk wanted his staff to gather information about what
comes next.
What will be the next project they
launch? What, of what already exists in the NHL, can they do better?
What can they introduce that doesn't exist?
These are the types of questions they
ask of themselves every day in their front offices.
With regards to Montreal, the Blackhawks are positioning themselves to
host an All-Star game of their own. In Montreal, they formally
submitted paperwork to the League expressing their interest in hosting
a game. It probably won't be soon -- there is no game in 2010 because
of the Olympics, and the games in 2011 and 2012 have been unofficially
awarded to Phoenix and Raleigh. But the Hawks are positioning
themselves to get that game in 2011 if there is no Phoenix team (and
the fact that the Blackhawks are quietly talking about that, and that
league insiders are encouraging them to talk about that, should scare
the bejeezus out of Coyote fans for the future of their team). Short
of that, they might settle for hosting a draft.
But the Blackhawks are also positioning themselves to make a
presentation to the league about what they think the league can do
better at the All-Star Weekend, or what the league could do in lieu of
the All-Star Weekend. It's clear that the Blackhawks believe the NHL
has acres of fertile ground upon which to grow. From their viewpoint
in Chicago, where until last year the Blackhawks didn't even have
enough of a presence to be ridiculed, it's an understandable position.
The guys on top are confident without being arrogant. Not only do they
come from another sport -- rare in the insulated world of hockey --
but they come from the top of that sports. These are the guys who
first created the marketing maelstrom which is the Chicago Cubs, but
they also perfected it. They took a decrepit old stadium in a dying
neighborhood and, amidst years of flailing somewhere on the spectrum
between baseball heartbreak at one end and baseball ineptitude on the
other, and made it a tourist destination. They took a team which
hasn't won in over a century, and made it the most popular team in the
National League.
And the people who work under them are special, too, because they have
to be. Some people find it hard to work for McDonough because he does
not suffer the lazy, the whiny, the sloppy, the gossipy or the slow.
He'll accept the untalented if they work their asses off. And so what
he and the Blackhawks have collected is a hard-charging group of young
go-getters, many of whom work late into the night truly on a nightly
basis, trying to come up with the next great idea or making sure that
the last great idea gets finished off.
In that way, the Blackhawks team off the ice reflects the type of team
they are building on the ice. And in both cases, they are poised to
have the kind of success that should make them the model for the
league to follow.
Josh
Mora,
a Columnist with TheFourthPeriod.com, is an Anchor and
Blackhawks Reporter with Comcast Sportsnet Chicago.
