As a 35-year-old goaltender at Blackhawks training camp, Alex Stalock feels roughly the same way he did as a 22-year-old goaltender at Sharks training camp in 2009.
He has no idea how this will pan out.
But the fact he’s at camp at all—on an NHL contract, penciled in as the Hawks’ backup to Petr Mrazek, competing every day to earn that role—is a small blessing in itself. The opportunity means a lot. After all, this is his first training camp since 2019.
“What I’ve learned in pro hockey is anything can change at any day,” Stalock said Monday. “There can be injuries. There can be sicknesses. Obviously, COVID now changes everything. You can never be complacent and say, ‘This is how it’s going to be,’ because I guarantee you that’s not how it’s going to be at the end of the year.”
Stalock has experienced a few of those days where everything changed. But the one in November 2020 during which he was diagnosed with myocarditis stands out above the rest.
Stalock was starting to prepare for the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season when he tested positive for COVID-19 during a routine entry into the Wild’s practice facility. Shortly after, an MRI revealed his heart muscle was inflamed. He needed to halt all physical activity or risk cardiac arrest.
“When you’ve got a wife and three kids at home, all of a sudden a lot of questions start hitting you in a hurry,” he said. “You read the paper, you read the internet, and there’s a lot of negative stuff out there. So that’s obviously first, thinking about your kids and family. And your hockey life gets pulled right out from underneath you.”
The news was shocking. He’d never developed cold symptoms from the virus itself. And he hadn’t felt any noticeable stamina reduction or shortness of breath during training, either.
“This was right when we were picking up skating, and we were working out and skating twice a day, so yeah, you’re exhausted,” he said. “As a professional athlete, you’re always like, ‘How’d I feel today? It was exhausting.’ But it wasn’t one of those things where I was taking a 30-second shift and I was hunched over, really struggling.”
Before the diagnosis, Stalock’s career was peaking, albeit at an unusually old age. The Minnesota native had played in a career-high 38 NHL games for the Wild in 2019-20, going 20-11-4 with a .910 save percentage.
Flashes of excellence he’d shown before—he went 12-5-2 with a .932 save percentage as an NHL rookie in 2013-14, for example, before his Sharks tenure gradually fizzled out—were showing up more and more consistently.
After the diagnosis, Stalock’s career was in real jeopardy. He missed all of the shortened season. Last September, it was announced he’d likely miss all of 2021-22, as well.
But around mid-season, he decided to reverse course and attempt a comeback. He’d met with about five different cardiologists, and because of myocarditis’ newness and the lack of research, they’d each given him slightly different recommendations. Ultimately, Stalock decided the ultimate test was to try playing hockey again.
“You can only do [so many] heart tests, stress tests, all these tests,” he said. “It’s not on the ice. It’s not playing a game with fans, adrenaline and all that stuff. The best thing was to go play, see how [my] heart felt and get an answer going into the summer.”
Health-wise, his comeback succeeded. He appeared in a combined 18 games from Jan. 23 on with the Oilers’ and Sharks’ organizations without any health complications. Hockey-wise, though, he struggled. He went 4-10-2 with an .869 save percentage in the AHL and allowed five goals in one NHL start.
“You think you’re in shape, you think you’re ready to go, but it’s so hard to catch up,” he said.
The Hawks decided to gamble on Stalock anyway, signing him to a one-year deal in July.
They hope his full offseason of training might elevate him back to his impressive 2019-20 levels. He hopes so, too, although it’s impossible right now to know for sure. He’ll make his Hawks preseason debut Tuesday against the Blues, splitting the 60 minutes with Mrazek.
If things go poorly over the coming months, the Hawks do have top goalie prospect Arvid Soderblom waiting in the wings, or they could claim a veteran goalie on waivers.
Ideally, though, Stalock turns out to be one of hockey’s best feel-good stories of the year. All the right ingredients are present. He already feels good in at least one way, too.
“It feels good to go home and be on the couch and have your legs sore,” he said. “You realize, ‘Holy cow, I missed this for three years.’”
And now that he has his career back, he’s finding it possible to adopt a glass-half-full perspective on his entire myocarditis experience.
“There’s obviously some unfortunate things that happened to people that were undiagnosed with it, so I’m fortunate enough we caught it early and treated it right,” he said. “Hopefully that’s in the past and I’ll have a clean slate of health moving forward, not only in the game of hockey but in my entire life.”
