Posted by Jim Neveau, Blackhawks Beat Writer
With the opening puck drop of the 2009-10 Blackhawks season quickly approaching, the winds of change are blowing fast and furious around the United Center.
Out are guys like Martin Havlat, Nikolai Khabibulin, and Dale Tallon. In are guys with incredible talents and even more incredible (i.e. large) contracts in Marian Hossa and Tomas Kopecky, and a GM in Stan Bowman who at 36 is youthful and exuberant, just like the team he is putting on the ice.
All in all, the upcoming season will quite possibly be the most eagerly anticipated in the long history of the franchise. With restricted free agency looming for three of the team’s biggest stars (Kane, Keith, and Toews), and the specter of a cap crunch on the horizon, the time is now or never for the Blackhawks to make hay in the NHL.
With all of this anticipation, there have come numerous calls for explanation as to why the team is headed in the particular direction that it is headed in. After all, how often is it that a GM who has just led his team to the verge of the Stanley Cup Finals get unceremoniously dumped over an overblown fiasco with paperwork?
How often is it that a player who was genuinely liked by the Chicago media and fans comes blasting out of the gate with incendiary claims against the team’s president, John McDonough, and at the same time calls him out for railroading the GM out of town and for allegedly pulling the strings behind the scenes?
To use a TV analogy, the Blackhawks are starting to more closely resemble “One Tree Hill” than “The Brady Bunch”.
They are the subject of so much media coverage for bad things, like RFA-gate and the comments of Martin Havlat, that people are no longer talking about them coming out of the Dark Ages of William Wirtz-inspired malaise and instead are talking about the running scandals plaguing the team.
Over a weekend that was supposed to be the apex of how much the team means to the city of Chicago, the first day of the second annual Blackhawks Convention was marred by fans lustily booing President McDonough, in an angry rebuke of his decision to fire popular GM Dale Tallon and move him to a Senior Adviser position.
This stunning reversal of the accolades that he has been used to since taking his position with the team demonstrates a fomenting discontent among the base, and makes one wonder about the potential consequences of a failure to win the Stanley Cup. Will a mob of unsympathetic fans call for the ouster of McDonough if the front office changes result in anything less than a title? Will fans turn away from the team if the signing of Hossa turns out to be the death knell for the tag-team of Toews and Kane on United Center ice?
Stan Bowman's Current Domain, but for How Long?
These questions are all hanging over the team as they steam toward their first practices of training camp in September, but amid all of the chatter over salary cap hits and possible trades to make room for the team’s young studs, there has been surprisingly little talk about an issue that could possibly hinder the team worse than any of the aforementioned issues.
That issue is the qualification of Stan Bowman to be the general manager of this franchise.
Amid all of the furor of the ouster of Dale Tallon, the story of Bowman’s ascendancy to the top of the front office food chain was lost in the shuffle. The green 36 year old has plenty of experience in the Hawks organization, but it is very uncommon for someone with no GM experience to take over a team that is so loaded with talent, aspirations, and looming salary cap issues.
For every columnist, sports writer, and blogger who has ad nauseum defended Tallon and stated that his firing was a mistake (Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune and Scott Burnside of ESPN immediately come to mind), there hasn’t been nearly enough talk about whether or not Bowman has the chops to handle the job himself.
After all, the mess that Tallon has left (the one that correctly led to his demise) is one that even veteran shopkeepers would hesitate to take over.
There are the massive contracts that have been doled out to Cristobal Huet and Brian Campbell that are currently handcuffing the Hawks’ efforts to do anything about their precarious position in terms of physical blue line play. Also involved are the ramifications of RFA-gate, which garnered Kris Versteeg and Cam Barker significant pay raises. Finally, the extension recently inked for Dave Bolland, and the previously discussed Hossa mega-deal make for a work environment that will be anything but stress-free, a possible stumbling block to someone as young as Bowman.
There is also the potential backlash that will inevitably be thrust upon him when he is forced to make salary cutting moves to make room for new contracts for Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, and Jonathan Toews after next season. Patrick Sharp and Dustin Byfuglien will likely be victims of this, and their status as fan favorites (and let’s be honest here: everyone on the Hawks is a fan favorite) will make it a very painful move when it happens. In addition to that looming threat, there is the sheer size of the deals to consider. If he thinks that the contracts that were given to Versteeg and Barker were unnecessarily big, then he is going to suffer an aneurysm when negotiating begins for the franchise’s three biggest prize studs.
Lastly on the financial front, is he ready to withstand the absolute crush of scrutiny, anger, and abandoning ship that will take place if somehow the Hawks lose one of those three players? The loss of Keith may be easier to absorb to most fans (even though that could prove possibly the most damaging), but if Toews or Kane were to find their way out of town, then a full scale riot would break out that would make the furor over the Tallon firing look like the fight in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” music video.
Even with all of these financial issues surrounding the team on the ice, there is still more that Bowman has to potentially deal with. Not the least of these problems is the crush of pressure that is going to befall this team in the coming months as the season draws near and the talk of a possible title becomes deafening. Is he going to be able to handle the press psycho-analyzing his every move? Is he going to have the intestinal fortitude to not second guess himself, even when everyone in the city does it on a daily basis?
Finally, there are issues that fans have that simply cannot be addressed with a clever ad campaign or press conference quip. Fans in the city of Chicago are big into conspiracy theories, and one of those being advocated among some fans is that Bowman is nothing more than a puppet, and that every move that he makes will be passed down on high from the two-headed hydra of McDonough and Bowman’s father Scotty.
If you’ll indulge a little history lesson here, puppet governments do not work. People do not trust them, and they are inevitably overthrown. Ask the Shah of Iran how well the US government’s backing worked in keeping him in power during the revolution in 1979. If people think you are merely a figure head for somebody else, they will fight you and get rid of you, and there is no disputing that.
Even if it’s simply a vocal minority that feel this way, the belief that Bowman is a puppet is just another stressor thrown onto a quickly growing pile of problems for the new GM. The issue over whether he will be able to handle all of the pressure and financial concerns is one to watch closely over the next couple of months.
By the time next off-season rolls around, this team will look vastly different than the composition that currently wears the red Indian-head sweater. The question inevitably will be: will this different team be a contender, a winner, or a hideously failed experiment? Only time will tell whether the hiring of Stan Bowman turns the Blackhawks into the next “Ellen”, or the next “The Magic Hour”.
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“and a GM in Stan Bowman who at 36 is youthful and exuberant, just like the team he is putting on the ice”
I don’t mean to correct you, but Stan is riddled with health problems. His cancer is in remission at the moment, but unfortunately, stress does have a way of taking a toll on a fragile body and this promises be his most stressful year. He’s gonna needs some serious help.