The Chicago Blackhawks And The Morbid Way Of Resurrecting A Franchise

When the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup this week, team owner Rocky Wirtz stood on the ice at the United Center while players celebrated all around him. Fans chanted "Rock-y! Rock-y!''–all of it a stark contrast to when Rocky's father and former team owner Bill Wirtz died eight years earlier, prompting local radio stations to play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.

This isn't easy to talk about, but the Blackhawks' success is making a clear point. A morbid point, too. But clear nonetheless. On Thursday, two million people showed up in Chicago for a rally and parade honoring the team, which now stands as possibly both the greatest source of community pride in Chicago (don't tell President Obama) and the best sports franchise in America, a dynasty for the modern era. But just eight years ago, the same Blackhawks arguably were the country's worst franchise, outdated and lacking fans.

What happened?

Well, Rocky Wirtz moved the Blackhawks into the modern era. That's the half of the story that's easy to tell, the part people are talking about. The other half is this: Without Bill's death, those two million people almost certainly would have been home Thursday, and the Blackhawks very likely wouldn't have even made it to the playoffs. Chances are, they would still be the worst.

The hard truth is that in death, the franchise found life. Sometimes, with some team owners, that's what it takes to turn things around.

On Monday, I stood next to on the ice and wondered if he might have any mixed feelings, being the king of Chicago when his dad, well, was not. I asked him: Are you thinking of your dad?

"I guarantee you he's happy,'' Rocky said. "And he's lifting the Cup himself.''

Hopefully so. But I doubt he would have lifted it in life. In fairness to Bill Wirtz, my point is actually bigger than the Blackhawks. It's about American sports in general. The business of owning a team has changed. Evolved. The old dinosaur owners are going extinct. Once upon a time, our owners seemed to fit a certain mold: basically, some rich tough-guy sitting on a throne, smoking a cigar. At least, that's how I pictured them.

So many of them ran their teams like a mom-and-pop store, and those who hung around into the ESPN and Internet era, when the money grew by multiples and exponents, found themselves running huge, multibillion-dollar companies in the manner of … mom-and-pop stores. Only you can't do that anymore. There are just too many dollars at stake, too many smart people working every possible angle, too many competing teams and outside sources of entertainment sniffing out every last market advantage and inefficiency.

The game passes by these owners—and yet, there's no way to get them out of the way. If players don't perform, they are gone. Managers, coaches, general managers. Even scouts. They are given a few years, a small window to succeed. But owners are just sort of there. There are no term limits, no contracts for them to renegotiate, no performance demands.

Consider Al Davis. He meant so much to the identity of the Raiders and their success, did so much to revolutionize professional football. Then his time passed and he hung around too long, burying his own beloved franchise. His son, Mark, is now struggling to dig it out.

Again: I know this is a morbid thought, but the only way out of some of these messes is, well … think about forest fires. Sometimes, they're good, because they clear out dead wood and provide space for new, fresh growth to emerge.

Chicago's most recent sports dynasty was Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. Last week, I talked to one of the players in that dynasty, Will Perdue, now a team television analyst for Comcast, about today's owners.

"I don't want to say, 'back in the day,' but owners are different now,'' he said. "This is an investment now, for making a profit, loving a sport but being smart about it.

Today, being smart means modern thinking, analytics and metrics, cutting edge technology. In my curmudgeonly sports writer heart, I'd like to call that stuff new age hokum. But then there's the Golden State Warriors: a team that was bought by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who hired a player agent to be the general manager, and together they hired a team psychologist and something called a director of athletic performance, and the the latter person monitors player injury potential with all sorts of advanced biometrics in the hope of reducing injuries.

And what happened? The Cleveland Cavaliers, the team with best-player-on-the-planet LeBron James, suffered a few serious injuries during the playoffs while the Warriors stayed freakishly healthy. Perhaps it's just dumb luck, but the Warriors are National Basketball Association champs.

The Blackhawks' path to a dynasty is something we've never seen before. It was a combination of smarts and great timing. And yes, when I write timing, I'm talking about Bill's passing.

In 2004, ESPN.com called the Blackhawks the worst franchise in all of sports. Sports Illustrated wasn't much nicer. Bill Wirtz was out of touch and unwilling to pay modern prices for players. He wouldn't even put his team's games on local television, thinking it would scare off ticket buyers. It was the old mentality of not letting dollars go out of the building before they came in.

Mom-and-pop.

Wirtz kept letting stars leave, including Jeremy Roenick and Eddie Belfour. The only upside? The team was so outrageously bad that it went on a years-long run of getting outrageously high draft picks, including No. 3 overall pick Jonathan Toews in 2006 and No. 1 overall pick Patrick Kane in 2007. Meanwhile, the National Hockey League adopted a hard salary cap following the 2004-05 lockout. The Blackhawks, of course, were nowhere near the cap at the time. But other teams were up against it. And over. They had to start dropping high-priced players.

And then in 2007, Dollar Bill Wirtz died. Rocky took over. Immediately, he put the team back on local TV. More importantly, he was willing to spend money on a suddenly talent-rich market, and also willing to modernize the team's operations. Rocky hired Cubs public relations guru John McDonough as franchise president and reestablished a relationship with Blackhawks legend Bobby Hull, who had been on the outs with Dollar Bill. Acclaimed coach Scotty Bowman, who has won nine Stanley Cups, is now a very hands-on consultant for the franchise. Stan Bowman, his son, is the general manager who has helped shape the team's current roster. Unlike his father, Rocky doesn't feel the need to make every decision by himself—the way the owner of a corner store might—and instead leans on his hired expertise.

Of course, this isn't the first time Chicago has seen one of its sports franchises held back by an outdated owner. Famed coach and National Football League co-founder George Halas stayed way too long as Bears owner. He was cheap and out of touch; fans used to say he threw around nickels like manhole covers. In 1983, he died. The next year, the Bears finished in first place for the first time in 21 years. The year after that? They won the Super Bowl. Cubs owner Phil Wrigley ran the team for more than three decades without one postseason appearance. Shortly after he died, the Cubs got to within one game of the 1984 World Series—and while they still haven't won a pennant, they have at least made the playoffs a handful of times. The Ricketts family, which now owns the Cubs, is leaning on the modern thinking of Theo Epstein, who seems to be successfully building the franchise through a Blackhawks-esque bottoming out and roster-restocking process.

So: if you're pulling for a team that's run by a dinosaur, or by an owner who just can't get out of their own way, don't despair. Think of the Blackhawks. Hope and change might be just around the corner. It's just not exactly the kind of thing you can cheer for.