If you ask someone who has won a Stanley Cup what the best moment of their career is or the best team they played on, the answer will almost always be tied to the team and season they won a Cup. But if you ask someone who has been a part of three Stanley Cup teams, well, that’s where things get dicey. So when we asked Brent Seabrook and Joel Quenneville which of the three most recent Cup-winning Blackhawks teams was best, it’s no surprise they struggled to pick one.
“I think that team [2010] was a special team. We were so young, we were raw. We lost to Detroit in the conference finals, I think we learned a lot from that,” said Seabrook. “We also were sort of up against the fence, we knew a lot of guys might be leaving, so it was sort of our last chance and we might not get another one.”
The outlook was a bit different for “Coach Q,” who considered the legacy of the franchise and their Cup drought, as well as his own as head coach.
“Obviously that one stands out. I thought the parade in 2010 was the most spectacular event of all of them. You know, you win and a lot of good things come with it,” said Quenneville. “When you haven’t won a Cup as a head coach or the team hasn’t won a championship in 49 years in the franchise with everything they’ve been through, it’s a special place to play and be a part of.”
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The 2013 Stanley Cup run will likely be remembered for a few major moments, including the “17 Seconds” comeback in Game 6 to clinch the Stanley Cup in Boston, but Quenneville remembers the many hurdles they had to overcome to get to that point.
“You went half the year unbeaten to start the season in the 48-game year and then you win, you’re probably expected to win, but that was not easy,” Quenneville said. “I mean every year, the final series were tough. I think of that year, we had a couple of tough hurdles.”
Seabrook echoed the sentiment that their regular season domination did not mean that they would breeze through the playoffs.
“We won the Presidents Trophy. We knew how to win, we’d been there before. We were excited, we had some new young guys,” said Seabrook. “We had some older guys, [Michal] Handzus, Jamal Mayers, some guys who had been around so we wanted to do it for them and we wanted to do it for ourselves.”
The comeback from down 3-1 against the rival Detroit Red Wings was something that stuck out to Seabrook, too, for obvious reasons.
“We had a good team, we had a tough stretch against Detroit,” he said. “We really learned a lot about ourselves in that series, being able to fight back and come back and win that and get to the top of the mountain and win again.”
The 2015 Stanley Cup run sticks out as a much less dominant team overall, but a team that relied on its experience in big moments to prevail.
“That whole playoffs, I think we were just a resilient, scrappy team. I think losing Kaner for the second half of the season or the last 20 games was tough. We were able to find a way to claw and scratch and get him to play more games which were big for us and when he came back, he was a special player as he always has been and we just sort of went...we just started rolling,” said Seabrook. “We had guys step up in big moments throughout the playoffs. [Antoine] Vermette I think, what did he have, two or three game winners in the Finals or something like that? And some big overtime goals from a lot of different guys. We just sort of felt like we had that belief. We were never out of a game, we were never going to lose.”
The prevailing theme? Winning a Stanley Cup is really hard.
“I mean every game...I just saw that the other day, where we scored late in the Game 6 and it was the first time in the whole series where there had been a team with a two goal lead,” recalled Quenneville. “So that’s how close it was and how close they were.”
So if you were looking for a definitive answer, you definitely didn’t get it. Each team was different and special in their own right. Bryan Bickell felt the same way in a recent episode of the Blackhawks Talk Podcast. What you did hear is how special those seasons were to both Seabrook and Quenneville.
“I think every team was special in its own way and it was just something I’ll never forget, going through the moments and those times,” Seabrook said.
“There’s so many amazing moments, and I don’t want to put anyone ahead of the other ones, because they all had, in their own way of accomplishing it, they’re all some real great series and it was fun being around the guys the whole process,” said Quenneville. “And that’s the best part about trying to win a Cup, is the way the team is, and the ups and downs, and all the challenges, and then you look back on it and you can really smile, and you got a real appreciation for the competitiveness basically from top to bottom of our group.”
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