McDonough wants return- around
Says Quenneville, Bowman will be back next season
Joel Quenneville and Stan Bowman will be back with the Blackhawks next season, not because of what they’ve done in the past but because of what they can do in the future.
That’s the way team president John McDonough put it Thursday, finally ending the speculation over the job security of the coach and general manager who helped bring three Stanley Cups to Chicago.
“I believe in continuity, and they’ve had an incredible body of success,” McDonough said. “We’re not tethered to the past. This has been a very disappointing year, and our expectations are incredibly high. We’re not going to deviate from those expectations. But I believe Stan and Joel are the guys that are going to bring this back.”
The news was well- received in the Hawks’ dressing room.
“That’s great,” Patrick Kane said. “You’re not going to find a better coach than Q.”
McDonough spoke with Bowman last week about his future and Quenneville’s. McDonough then had a long chat with Quenneville on Thursday morning, three days before the end of the first losing season of his 21- year coaching career. Quenneville has two years left on his contract at about $ 12 million, but the Hawks’ second- half free fall raised the possibility that his message had grown stale.
McDonough said he didn’t believe that was the case. And he pointed to the encouraging progress of young stars in the making — Nick Schmaltz, Alex DeBrincat, Vinnie Hinostroza — as a major point in Quenneville’s favor.
“I know at one point, that was kind of a knock on Joel, that he wasn’t proficient at coaching young players,” McDonough said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” McDonough pointed out that a year ago at this time, the Hawks were one of the favorites to win the Stanley Cup. Since then, they’ve been swept by the Predators, traded away Artemi Panarin and Niklas Hjalmarsson, unsuccessfully reimagined their roster with grittier players, U- turned into a full- blown youth move- ment and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2008.
Goalie Corey Crawford missed the last three months of the season with a head injury the team tried to keep under wraps. Brandon Saad struggled in his return. Jonathan Toews’ production dropped. Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook took a step back. Basically, anything that could’ve gone wrong, went wrong.
“A lot of things went sideways this year,” Toews said. “Everyone’s committed to fixing the issues and the problems that we faced this year, and the same goes for Joel and Stan.”
McDonough said he’s very optimistic that Crawford will be ready to play next season. And while the Bruins, Penguins and Kings all took a few years to retool on the fly, McDonough said the bar will not be lowered in Chicago. The timetable, as ever, is now.
He said that there’ll be some “deep and heavy conversations” about how to fix the team, and that the core needs to be better, the special teams need to be better ( Quenneville will have final say on any staff changes, he said) and that Quenneville, Bowman and McDonough himself need to be better.
But one awful season wasn’t enough for him to blow it all up and start over. Not after everything the trio has accomplished in the last decade.
“The standards are very high here,” McDonough said. “People want to put a brand on it. They want to [ call it] a retool or a rebuild. I’d like to re- win. . . . You’ve seen a lot of teams that missed the playoffs last year that are now back in the hunt to win the Stanley Cup.
‘‘ I want that to be the Chicago Blackhawks going forward. I have confidence in Stan and Joel figuring this out.”
Quenneville said he had tried to tune out the speculation the last couple of months but was clearly relieved to get the green light.
“We’re excited today,” he said. “It’s been a tough year, but we all expect and look forward to getting back to where we want to be, and that’s a contending team, and learning from this experience.”