John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative
They’re calling it the most dramatic goal in franchise history, the one Patrick Kane scored against the Philadelphia Flyers four minutes into overtime Wednesday night, enabling his Blackhawks to hoist the Stanley Cup for the first time in 49 years.
Dramatic, for sure — -the Cup is the most prized possession in hockey, and the Hawks’ title drought was by far the longest among the National Hockey League’s Original Six pioneers.
It was also confusing. The goal judge didn’t see Kane’s lethally quick strike from an impossible left-side angle zip through goaltender Michael Leighton’s pads and bury itself in the back of the net. So the red light didn’t go on, and players who’d been pounding on each other for 64 desperately competitive minutes sort of stopped and milled around, as if waiting for a taxi.
But Kane knew what he had done and what it meant. He made a sharp right turn in the opposite corner and streaked up the ice, discarding his stick, his helmet and his gloves as he sped toward the Hawks’ goal. Kane’s teammates came to a gradual realization that something wonderful had happened, that this grueling, enervating, totally draining campaign was over. And they had won. The celebration began before the goal was confirmed.
“The coolest feeling in the world,” Kane said after the game. “To score the winning goal in the Stanley Cup finals is something you dream about as a kid. It’s unbelievable.”
Patrick Kane is 21. He has already played three seasons in the N.H.L., and he is so uncommonly talented that it’s easy to forget how young he is. He was the league’s rookie of the year as a 19-year-old in 2007-08. He led the Hawks in scoring and was ninth in the league with 88 points this season, most among American-born players. He was probably the best player on the silver medal United States team at the Winter Olympics, and he led the Hawks with eight points in the six games of the Cup finals, after being blanked in the first two.
“Someone had to be the hero, and it was Kaner,” said Jonathan Toews, the Hawks’ captain. “He was awesome the whole series.”
For all his self-assurance, there is a bit of the rascal in Kane, as there is with many 21-year-olds who don’t always make the soundest behavioral choices. In August, Kane was involved in a dispute over a fare with a Buffalo cab driver that got nasty, and he was briefly detained. In November, as he celebrated his 21st birthday with teammates in Vancouver, photos of a shirtless Kane frolicking with ladies in a limo created an unflattering buzz on the Internet for a couple of days.
“The year didn’t start off very good back in August,” Kane said. “Sometimes you go through these things as a young kid. You can learn from them and try to better yourself as an athlete and a person.”
The Hawks are confident that Kane has done that. A month after the Vancouver incident, they signed him to a five-year contract extension worth $31.5 million and identified him as the face of the franchise, along with Toews and defenseman Duncan Keith.
“We don’t make these decisions in a vacuum,” said Stan Bowman, the general manager. “We research them very carefully and make sure they’re the type of guys we want representing the franchise as people as well as players.”
The investment has paid off nicely already. Toews, 22, won the Conn Smythe Award as the most valuable player of the playoffs for accumulating 29 points in 22 games. It could just as easily have gone to Keith, 26, whose gap-toothed grit came to personify the Hawks’ effort after he lost seven teeth stopping a puck with his face in Game 4 of the San Jose series, but played on.
Toews, who was named Hawks captain when he was 21, awes teammates with his maturity and sense of purpose, Captain Serious to Kane’s Eddie Haskel.
“When I bring my 10-year-old in the room, I tell him to watch Jonny if you want to be a hockey player,” said John Madden, the Hawks’ elder statesman at 37. “He loves Kaner and he loves me because I’m his dad. But I tell him to watch Jonny, how he handles himself.”
Longtime Hawks observers are reminded of Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, two of the top performers and toughest competitors in franchise history: One a larger-than-life personality, the free-wheeling life of the party on and off the ice, the other an all-business, coolly efficient killer.
Hull was 22 and Mikita 20 when the Hawks last won the Stanley Cup in 1961. They reached the finals three more times as teammates but never hoisted itthe cup again.
Toews and Kane are off to a great start, but they still have something to shoot for.
Mr. McGrath–This has been a diffficult year for Sabres fans. Nothing unusual in that respect. However, I think that Ryan Miller and many others, esp. some folks at the Olympics, would be surprised by your assessment that Patrick Kane “was probably the best player on the silver medal United States team at the Winter Olympics.” I cannot blame you for any giddiness in the glow of a well-deserved Stanley Cup (supported by many Buffalonians because of the Patrick Kane, Brian Campbell, Stan Bowman connection), but your comment was ridiculous.