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Wrap up for a long period of cold, Blackhawks fans. Winter is coming. Or at least, it was better to be.
If you've been on the Hawks' train for a while, this climate change could be shocking. For those of you who have longer loyalties, this may sound familiar but no less uncomfortable.
The dismissal of Joel Quenneville effectively ends the greatest epoch of modern Hawks' history. The following is probably a painful descent, first to mediocrity, then, hopefully, to even lower depths.
Why I hope? Because everything at the bottom is the only way to go up.
How could the Hawks have recruited transformational actors such as Jonathan Toews (3rd in 2006) and Patrick Kane (1st in 2007)? Simple. They hit the bottom.
The Hawks still have hope even in the short term, according to statements by team chairman John McDonough and president Rocky Wirtz. Fans should pray for them to smoke.
The Hawks have to deflate, really, and the sooner the better.
And history tells us that they may have the ideal type for "the fall" of Jeremy Colliton, 33, replacing Quenneville.
Starting in the 1997-1998 season, the dark age before the Rocky revival, the Hawks missed the playoffs nine times in ten years. Brian Sutter, who had previously coached in St. Louis (four), Boston (three) and Calgary (three), was the only playoff player of that period.
All of Sutter's "success" has been to extend the Hawks' time in the limbo of the NHL. They would have done better to fail faster.
The other coaches during this barren period were novices like Colliton: Craig Hartsburg, Dirk Graham, Lorne Molleken, Alpo Suhonen, Trent Yawney and Denis Savard. Of those six, only Hartsburg was again hired as the NHL's head coach.
Colliton is another novice with no experience in NHL training. Quenneville, on the other hand, had been head coach of the NHL for 11 years before replacing Savard. Rather than hoping that Colliton somehow leads the current team to a playoff spot, Hawks fans should be hoping he's just a dismantling guardian.
Colliton is the league's youngest coach and younger than many of his players, including Duncan Keith, Corey Crawford and Brent Seabrook. If the Hawks rebuild properly, these 30 years will not be here for long. They will be cut or processed for leads, selections and caps. The future belongs to players who are not there yet, with Alex DeBrincat, Henri Jokiharju and Adam Boqvist.
Are they the basis of a future Hawks championship team? Will Colliton be here to see it? This is the best scenario for the Hawks: a brief fall and a spectacular comeback in the elite of the NHL. In the worst case, Colliton is what Tim Floyd was for the Bulls after the dynasty, the first of a succession of persistent failures and false starts in decades.
Like Floyd, Colliton is considered a progressive coach capable of building relationships with young players. Quenneville, who turned 60 in September, was seen by some as a hard-headed leader who did not trust anyone under the age of 30. But this has never been a fair evaluation. He trusted young players who proved they could compete and rightly avoided those who could not. In his second race with the Hawks, Quenneville showed great confidence in Brandon Saad, 20, Andrew Shaw, 21, and Marcus Kruger, 22, as well as his young man. 24 years. superstars Kane and Toews.
But year after year, Quenneville had to attend the departure of the players he trusted, most of them in movements motivated by salary caps. He would have been particularly unhappy with defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson's job before last season, a deal that rejuvenated the Hawks, but did not improve them. He could not have been happier with the changes that General Manager Stan Bowman has made this past season, which did not accomplish either.
One has to wonder if Quenneville's impatience with Nick Schmaltz this season was a turning point in his dismissal. Schmaltz, a player often introduced by Bowman as a future star, was a healthy scratch on the recent winless trip. Choosing the first round in 2014, Schmaltz scored 21 goals last season but played only one game out of 14 this year. Some thought Quenneville was sending a message to his team. Maybe he sent a message to his boss.
Colliton supports a very imperfect training but with too much expensive talent to go bankrupt dramatically. Bowman has to solve this problem. To reach the bottom, the Hawks will have to find a way to move their best players and their "no-trade" contracts. They will probably have to accept the bad contracts of someone else in the process. But that's where we discover how creative and efficient GM Bowman is.
Bowman may have three cuts to his resume, but his predecessor, Dale Tallon, has gathered the core of these teams. Bowman's record for trades and independent agent signings is uneven, to be nice. Yes, he had been put in a corner by the salary cap, but Bowman was really holding the brush – or the pen – when he had signed some of the contracts that had brought him there.
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