I have a TextEdit file — yes, I write exclusively in TextEdit — that is just several hundred phrases, clauses, half-sentences and occasional gibberish. They’re all story ideas. Like a standup comic who wakes up in the middle of the night, thinks of something funny and immediately jots it down on a napkin or those little paper pads hotels leave out for guests, I take any fleeting thought that passes through my increasingly dilapidated brain and throw it into that file. At the rink. On a plane. In bed. At a red light. Mid-conversation. Right into the file.
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Some of them are quite clear, such as “Marketing Bedard” or “Warmup routines.” Some of them (mostly) make sense to me, such as “Puck cleaner-outer-type jobs” and “Midstream double-dutch” and “Veruca Salt.” And sometimes, like that standup comic, I can’t even decipher my own thoughts in the light of day. One just says “Shenanigans.” Another says “Swedish fish?” Huh? No idea.
When a story idea becomes an actual story, I italicize it and move it to the bottom of the list. Down there are “How do goalies bend like that?” and “What language do you think in?” and “Raising kids in a foreign country” and “What do you do with your last team’s gear?” and “Changing clothes 10 times a day” and “Losing after winning” and countless others. But as incredibly satisfying as it is to italicize a completed story idea, most of them never come to fruition. Some die on the vine, some become suddenly obsolete because of an injury or a trade. More often than not, though, they just fail. Maybe I’ll start asking a player a question about some weird thought I had and he’ll stare at me like I have a third foot sprouting from my forehead. Or maybe I’ll ask a question, get an interesting answer, say “Huh” and just move on. Not every idea is destined to be a unique 2,500-word exploration of the quirks of hockey and the human mind. Alas.
With the 2023-24 season now behind us, let’s empty the notebook of some of those stalled story ideas (not all of them; there’s not enough bandwidth on the internet to handle all my failures). Here are a handful of interesting conversations I had and things I noticed this past season that, ultimately, went nowhere:
At a late December morning skate at the United Center, I noticed Chicago Blackhawks equipment manager Troy Parchman lighting a Louis Crevier jersey on fire. OK, well, not exactly, but he was holding one of those long BIC stick lighters up to a Crevier jersey, one of many jerseys hanging on a rack.
Turns out he was burning off loose and stray threads, to keep it looking brand new. The rough and tumble nature of hockey leaves jerseys stretched and frayed, and one of Parchman’s myriad responsibilities is keeping those jerseys looking clean and fresh. It made me wonder how many jerseys a player goes through in a year. After all, a player will use dozens of sticks, each of which costs several hundred dollars. Some players, such as Duncan Keith, switch out their skates every few games. Those aren’t cheap, either. So what about the jerseys?
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I was quite surprised to learn from Parchman that players only get two home jerseys and two road jerseys all season. They wear the same home red jersey and the same road white jersey through the first half of the season, then get a new set for the back half. Obviously, if there’s a tear or some other problem with the jersey, it’ll be replaced. But for the most part, each player gets just two of each. Better take good care of it.
The first time I walked past Alex Petrovic’s locker in Dallas before Game 1 of the Western Conference final, I did a double-take. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time. Petrovic had been in the AHL for all but one game since 2019 before the Stars called on him to play a major role in the playoffs. But the man probably deserves to have his name on the Stanley Cup with both Vegas and Tampa Bay, because Petrovic essentially created the long-term injured reserve loophole that causes so much consternation among fans and pundits these days.
After all, it was Petrovic who shoved Patrick Kane into the boards on Feb. 24, 2015, when he was a rookie with the Florida Panthers. Kane broke his clavicle on that hit and didn’t return until (what are the odds?) Game 1 of the playoffs. In the meantime, GM Stan Bowman put him on LTIR and used that extra cap space to acquire center Antoine Vermette, who played a big role in the Blackhawks’ championship run that spring. That highlighted the usefulness of LTIR and made exploiting it a key front-office strategy for many teams.
So all of it — Nikita Kucherov’s “$18M Over the Cap” T-shirt, Mark Stone’s annual trip to LTIR — traces back to Petrovic.
I had to ask him about it.
“I never really thought about that till you just said it,” he said with a laugh. “My brother always said I had a hand in (Chicago) winning the Cup, though. It’s funny you said that because I was just reading an article today on Patrick Kane, and all the overtime goals he scored in the playoffs. I guess he had a lot of rest that year.”
Nobody’s ever looking to severely injure a player, of course, but it’s especially mortifying when you’re a rookie injuring a superstar. Petrovic said he apologized to Kane after the hit through Brian Campbell, Kane’s old teammate and Petrovic’s Panthers teammate at the time. Kane told him not to worry about it, calling it “a freak accident.”
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“Everyone thought I cross-checked him hard,” Petrovic said. “But as I was hitting him, he toe-picked and went into the boards. It was an unfortunate incident, but it was weird having that happen as a young guy. I felt really bad.”
At least it all worked out in the end. For Kane, for the Blackhawks, for the Lightning, for the Golden Knights …
You’d never wish a broken leg on anybody, but for Samuel Savoie, there were some blessings in disguise that came from the fractured femur he suffered in the preseason last fall. The third-round pick in the 2022 draft and one of the more intriguing Blackhawks prospects due to his agitating style of play suffered the injury while on the Blackhawks’ preseason roster. That meant he stayed with the Blackhawks throughout his recovery, rather than heading back to his QMJHL team. He worked with Blackhawks doctors, skated with other injured Blackhawks players, sat in on Blackhawks video sessions and got to live something of the NHL lifestyle until he returned to the QMJHL on Feb. 1. Savoie was always around the team, something he never would have gotten to experience had he not been injured.
“I don’t think it happens that often to where somebody gets hurt in training camp and they’re on IR for three-quarters of the season,” said Mark Eaton, Blackhawks assistant general manager. “But yeah, he definitely did make the most of that situation.”
Seeing Savoie after nearly every morning skate made me wonder: Did he get his NHL salary all that time? Savoie’s entry-level contract carries an $870,000 salary when he’s in the NHL and an $82,500 salary when he’s in the AHL. It’s quite a difference.
Well, it turned out he made neither. Since Savoie still hasn’t actually turned pro, he got only a fraction of his junior salary, which is actually just a small stipend to cover some basic living expenses while staying with a billet family. That might explain why Savoie always had a couple of takeout boxes from the team meal with him as he left the arena.
I spent years pushing to do a story on the dreaded Veruca Salt/pilgrim collar that Adidas put on the Blackhawks jerseys from 2017-19. Nobody in the Blackhawks organization wanted to go near it, though, because they didn’t want their names anywhere near a jersey that was so universally reviled.
So when I had a chance to talk with Brian Jennings, the NHL’s chief branding officer, for a story on the new Fanatics jerseys, I couldn’t resist asking him about those ill-fated white collars, and then-Blackhawks vice president of marketing Pete Hassen’s pushback on them.
“I recall it being called a ‘priest collar,’” Jennings said with a laugh.
The “Adizero” jerseys were introduced ahead of the 2017-18 season. Jennings said there was a baseline template for all 31 teams (at the time) with some slight modifications allowed for shoulders, striping and secondary logos. Each team was given a two-dimensional look at the uniforms ahead of time, and the Blackhawks apparently thought it was fine until they saw it in three dimensions on an actual, physical jersey. It was a disaster.
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But it was also too late.
“I do remember the feedback, and remember talking with Pete Hassen,” Jennings said. “I was like, ‘Pete, we have a three-year cycle.’ When you have an identity change, you live with that for three years. It’s quite the process.”
The jerseys were met with a shocking amount of vitriol, but when it comes to NHL sweaters, that’s considered a good thing.
“Whenever there are changes, you see the amount of passion that goes into it,” Jennings said. “Sometimes it’s good. But sometimes there’s a change they don’t like, and they’re going to be vocal and let you know. The worst thing that can creep in is apathy. And they clearly still have a lot of passion for it.”
Back during the championship era, when there was such stability on the roster from year to year, I could identify most of the Blackhawks from way up top in the press box on stride alone. But the roster now changes wildly from year to year, and that’s gotten harder and harder.
Except for MacKenzie Entwistle. The newly signed Panthers forward skates around like the Hulk, shoulders always lurching forward in a menacing position. The only other players I could think to compare it to are Milan Lucic and maybe a little Leon Draisaitl.
I finally asked Entwistle about it after a morning skate in Calgary in late January.
“You know what? I have no idea,” he said with a laugh. “Growing up as a little kid, that’s just how I learned to skate.”
By the time he was 13 and it became clear he had a future in hockey, a handful of skating coaches tried to get him to skate a little more upright, to avoid putting himself in vulnerable positions. Entwistle pointed to Jonathan Toews’ easily distinguishable heavy stride as a model he could strive for. But skating is a lot like pitching in baseball. Yes, you want to tweak a pitcher’s mechanics to maximize his ability. But you also have to work within his own natural mechanics; you can’t ask him to entirely relearn the way he’s always done it, because you risk losing his natural ability in the process.
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Entwistle worked with skills coach Brian Keane and others to improve his stride and his stance — he has a natural tendency to hop a bit when crossing over, and he’s been trying to unlearn that in favor of a smoother, stronger push-off — but you’ll never see him skating upright, with his shoulders back. It’s just not him. It’s not what got him here.
Entwistle waxed poetic about the intricacies of skating for several minutes. It actually was a rather fascinating conversation (with Colin Blackwell relentlessly chirping him throughout), but a little too deep into the weeds for a full story.
“Look at a golf swing; everyone swings differently,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how you get it done. (Dylan Strome) has a different stride, but he gets it done. Everyone’s different, everyone’s body is different. Some guys have bad hips so their stride changes. Guys get older and they have to compensate for things. It’s something that you’re always consciously working on, but when you get out there in a game, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got the puck now, I’ve got to do this with my strides, I’ve got to get my legs back in this position in this amount of time.’ You’re just playing. That’s just how I play.”
One more Patrick Kane-related bit from the Dallas locker room. After scoring the series-winning goal in the second overtime against Colorado in Round 2, Matt Duchene busted out Kane’s famous “heartbreaker” celebration, the one he used after eliminating the Los Angeles Kings in double-overtime in the 2013 Western Conference final. Turns out everyone in the state of Texas had asked him about it already. I must have missed all that. My bad.
“I have no idea where it came from,” Duchene told me. “I didn’t even know I did it until after the game when (Ty) Dellandrea started laughing at me about it. I was pretty young when Kaner did that, so maybe it’s something that just stuck with me. I’ve never been a pre-planned celebration guy at all, and I’d rather just put my hands up. I guess I was too excited there, and something came out of my subconscious. People seemed to like it, at least.”
(Photo of MacKenzie Entwistle: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
