Duncan Keith took a puck to the face Sunday, spilling seven teeth — three from the top, four from the bottom — onto the United Center ice. He missed seven minutes of play while the dentists numbed him up, then skated back out and helped his team finish off the San Jose Sharks to sweep the NHL Western Conference finals. How do you spot the die-hard Blackhawks fans? They’re not impressed.
That sort of thing happens in professional hockey all the time, though it’s been a while since Chicago paid much attention. The Hawks are headed to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since 1992. For a lot of us, it’s like tuning in to the “Lost” finale without having watched a single episode.
Who knew, for example, that hockey would still be going on in June? It wasn’t always so. The finals were in April when the Hawks last won the cup, in 1961.
Half a century without a championship isn’t so bad, by Chicago standards, but we have to believe Cubs fans have hung in there in part because they could watch their team lose on television. The Hawks lost a lot of support during the 1990s and early 2000s, when then owner “Dollar Bill” Wirtz jacked up ticket prices and enforced a local TV blackout. In 2004, ESPN named the Blackhawks the worst franchise in all of professional sports. Ouch.
The games are all on TV now, and the team leads the league in attendance. This is partly because the franchise has had an attitude adjustment under Wirtz’s son Rocky, but mostly because, hey, they’re winning.
If you’re just tuning in, there are a few things you should know.
The players aren’t usually so hairy. They’re sporting playoff beards — except for baby-faced right winger Patrick Kane, who opted for a playoff mullet.
That song you hear after every Blackhawks home goal? It’s “Chelsea Dagger,” by the Fratellis, though ESPN viewers are more likely to recognize it from the Amstel Light commercials.
The thing with the teeth is called “spitting Chiclets.” Nice. Nothing says takes-a-licking-and-keeps-on-ticking quite like it. (“He just threw his teeth on the ice and skated away,” New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur once said, describing Buffalo Sabre Alexei Zhitnik’s reaction to being hit in the face with a stick.)
In deference to the hockey moms out there, nearly half the players now wear mouth guards. Kane is one of them, sort of. He’s famous for flying around the ice with his mouthpiece dangling, a habit that Detroit Red Wings forward Johan Franzen found so irritating that he plucked it from Kane’s mouth and threw it on the ice during Game 3 of last year’s Western Conference finals. Pacifier-gate, they called it. The Red Wings lost to the Sharks in the second round this year. We’re just saying, big man.
