It was always Kane and Toews, unless it was Toews and Kane. It was possible to say one name without saying the other, but it felt like you were breaking a law if you did. They were ever together, even when they weren’t. A package deal of excellence.
The temptation is to say that they were joined at the hip check, but Jonathan Toews likely would argue that Patrick Kane hasn’t checked anyone in his life.
Kane is gone now, with the Blackhawks and the Rangers finally working out a deal to send him from Chicago to New York. Toews probably will be gone in the not-too-distant future, whether that’s because of his health or because he decides he’s finally willing to play somewhere else as the Hawks’ rebuild continues.
Endings are a foregone conclusion in sports, but this one feels strange nonetheless. For most of the past 16 seasons, Chicago has only known an existence that involved Toews and Kane. It was an existence of Stanley Cup titles, spectacular athleticism, major individual awards and hockey that mattered in a town that too often kept its distance from the sport.
Now there’s just Toews, who is out of action while dealing with symptoms of long COVID and chronic immune response syndrome.
You know when people regret realizing too late what they had? We were never like that. We knew, in real time, that we were blessed.
Kane was every opponent’s nightmare, a shell game of a player who could embarrass defenders at any moment. He knew it, and they knew it. Now you see the puck, now you don’t. It was absolutely perfect that, when he scored the Stanley Cup-clinching goal against the Flyers in 2010, he seemed to be the only one in the building who knew he had slipped a shot past goalie Michael Leighton. A dynasty was born that night.
Toews was every coach’s dream, a born leader who happened to be very, very good at hockey. He was relentless, and he was strong. He was hell for defenders trying to knock him off the puck. When I asked teammate John Scott in 2011 what specifically made Toews so good, he looked at me as if I were from a planet devoid of ice.
“His legs and his ass are gigantic,’’ Scott said.
Oh, I said.
Sometimes Toews and Kane played on the same line, and sometimes they didn’t. That didn’t change the perception of them as a united force of nature. Toews, the team captain at 20, and Kane, the eternal Boy Wonder.
Toews was the third overall pick in the 2006 NHL draft, and Kane the top overall pick the following year, when each made their debut with the Hawks. They were inseparable almost from the start, in part because former team president John McDonough often pushed them out into the community to spread the gospel of Hawks hockey. However young they were, they looked younger. I once asked both players early in their careers how often they shaved. That went over about as well as you’d expect.
This is starting to sound like an obituary. If it is, it’s for the death of imagination. Somebody thought up this dynamic duo, and no one will have the audacity to do it again. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same stadium. You can argue that the Kane-Toews era was buried a long time ago. Toews’ skills have eroded with his health struggles, and Kane, though still obviously talented, has lost some of his wattage playing for average to bad teams.
Still, the end is official now. And it’s disorienting.
There were bad times. Kane had legal problems early in his career that easily could have earned him a ticket out of town. He punched a cab driver in Buffalo in 2009, then was accused of rape in a messy 2015 case that led to no charges being filed against him.
The three Stanley Cups the Hawks won were dirtied by the revelation that the franchise had delayed action after a prospect said he’d been sexually assaulted by a member of the team’s staff in 2010. It eventually led to McDonough’s firing, the resignation of general manager Stan Bowman and the resignation of Panthers coach Joel Quenneville, who was the Hawks coach at the time of Kyle Beach’s accusations against video coach Brad Aldrich. Beach’s teammates said they didn’t know about the abuse, but the taint has covered everyone in the organization.
The fairy tale ending would have had Kane and Toews retiring together after playing their entire careers for one franchise. But warm and fuzzy can be dangerous for a rebuilding team. Sentimentality shouldn’t get in the way of acquiring more draft picks. That was the push and the pull of the situation.
We knew this was coming. But, again, strange.
Two players now on different paths to the Hall of Fame. Two players still riding side by side.
Kane and Toews. Toews and Kane.
