Chicago Blackhawks | History & Notable Players | Britannica (original) (raw)
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Chicago Blackhawks, American professional ice hockey team based in Chicago. The Blackhawks are part of the “Original Six,” the group of teams that made up the National Hockey League (NHL) from 1942 until the 1967 expansion. They have won six Stanley Cup titles.
Founding and early Stanley Cup wins
The team was established in 1926 by Chicago-based businessman Frederic McLaughlin, who was awarded one of the first U.S. expansion franchises by the NHL and subsequently purchased the defunct Portland Rosebuds of the Western Hockey League to form the nucleus of his team. In 1929 the team moved into Chicago Stadium, which was then the largest indoor sporting venue in the world, and it would serve as the team’s home until 1994.
Originally known as the Black Hawks (the spelling was changed to “Blackhawks” in 1986 to match the original NHL paperwork), the team had some early success, with Stanley Cup wins in the 1933–34 and 1937–38 seasons. The second championship was notable because the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup after posting a regular-season record of 14–25, the worst record of any team to go on to win the title (that they were in the playoffs at all owed to the fact that six of the NHL’s eight franchises qualified for the postseason at the time).
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The Black Hawks returned to the Stanley Cup finals in 1943–44 but were swept in four games by the Montreal Canadiens. They soon entered into the worst stretch of play in team history, finishing every season but two between 1946–47 and 1956–57 at the bottom of the NHL standings.
Renaissance in the 1960s
The 1960s was a period of renaissance for Chicago as squads featuring future Hall of Famers Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Glen Hall, and Pierre Pilote advanced to three Stanley Cup finals and won the franchise’s third title with an underdog win over the Detroit Red Wings to cap off the 1960–61 season. In the 1969–70 season the Black Hawks acquired goaltender Tony Esposito, who would go on to set the franchise record with 418 wins and be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
The 1969–70 season also marked the beginning of 28 consecutive playoff berths for the franchise, the second longest streak of postseason play in NHL history. Over the course of those 28 years, however, the team advanced to just three Stanley Cup finals, losing on each occasion.
Despite the team’s failure to capture the Stanley Cup, the streak featured a number of high points. Notably, Mikita, Hull, Esposito, and Keith Magnuson anchored a Black Hawk team that lost a dramatic seven-game Stanley Cup final to a dominant Canadiens team in 1970–71. The Black Hawks returned to the finals two years later, but again they were defeated by Montreal. The team finished atop their division seven times in the 1970s.
A new anthem tradition
A franchise tradition began during the 1985 playoffs when Chicago fans—after watching their team get soundly defeated in the first two games of the conference finals by the Edmonton Oilers—cheered loudly during the U.S. national anthem, drowning out the singer; since then all home games, at Chicago Stadium and later the United Center, featured raucous cheering during the national anthem by the home crowd.
Chicago added popular players Jeremy Roenick and Ed Belfour in 1988, who then guided the (now single-named) Blackhawks to the Presidents’ Trophy (as the team with the best regular-season record) in 1990–91 and to the Stanley Cup finals in 1991–92, where they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in four games.
The Blackhawks continued their decades-long playoff streak through the 1996–97 season, when the team finished fifth (of six) in their division and lost in the first round of the playoffs. Starting in 1997–98, the Blackhawks would fail to reach the playoffs for 10 seasons, with one exception: 2001–02, when the team fell to the St. Louis Blues in the conference quarterfinals.
Toews, Kane, Quenneville, and three Stanley Cups
2013 Stanley Cup finalsPatrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks (right) skating toward Andrew Ference of the Boston Bruins during the Stanley Cup finals in Boston, June 2013.
The team struggled through most of the first decade of the 21st century, as the Blackhawks’ ownership made personnel decisions that did not translate into success on the ice and alienated a large swath of its fan base. But changes to team management—including the hiring of Joel Quenneville as head coach a few games into the 2008–09 season—and roster moves that focused on young talent—notably center Jonathan Toews and right wing Patrick Kane—resulted in the Blackhawks’ returning to the playoffs in 2008–09 after a five-season absence.
The team advanced to the Stanley Cup finals for the 2009–10 season and defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in six games to end a 49-year championship drought. But the team followed this Stanley Cup win with two straight first-round playoff losses.
In 2012–13 the Blackhawks won another Presidents’ Trophy by posting the best record in the league during a lockout-shortened campaign, which included an NHL-record 24 consecutive games without a regulation loss to start the season. They advanced to the Stanley Cup finals during the postseason, notably defeating the rival Red Wings along the way in a seven-game conference semifinals series that Chicago trailed three games to one. In the particularly dramatic finals, the Blackhawks defeated the Boston Bruins in six games. Three games went into overtime—including a triple-overtime game one—and the Blackhawks won game six by scoring two goals in the final 1:16 of play to overcome a one-goal deficit.
The following season the Blackhawks again advanced to the conference finals, where the team faced the Los Angeles Kings in that best-of-seven series for the second consecutive year. However, Chicago’s run of late-in-the-series heroics (the team was undefeated in its previous 13 games five, six, and seven) ended, and the Kings eliminated the Blackhawks in overtime of game seven.
The Blackhawks made it to the conference finals for the third consecutive year during the 2014–15 season and advanced to the Stanley Cup finals by winning a seven-game series against the Anaheim Ducks. Chicago then won a third Stanley Cup in six years, defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning in a six-game series in which no team had more than a one-goal lead until the final period of play.
A slump and struggles in the 2020s
Blackhawks home game, 2016Andrew Desjardins of the Chicago Blackhawks (left) and Dylan DeMelo of the San Jose Sharks pursuing the puck during a game in Chicago, February 2016.
Despite the generally strong postseason play by the Chicago teams of this era, the Blackhawks were on the losing side of the first sweep of a top-seeded team by an eighth-seeded team in NHL history when they fell to the Nashville Predators in four straight games during the opening round of the 2016–17 playoffs.
The team’s play fell off precipitously in 2017–18, as the Blackhawks posted a losing record and failed to qualify for the postseason for the first time since 2007–08. Quenneville was fired as head coach early in the 2018–19 season. The team returned to playoffs in the 2019–20 season, which was shortened because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but lost in the first round. In December 2020 Toews was sidelined due to health issues; he struggled to return in following years, suggesting long COVID and chronic immune response syndrome were contributing factors, and left the NHL in 2023.
For the next three seasons, the Blackhawks finished at or near the bottom of their division. The team’s poor performance helped to put them into position to secure the first pick in the 2023 draft, and they selected Connor Bedard, considered the most promising young player to enter the NHL in years. During the 2023–24 season, Bedard was Chicago’s top scorer and led all NHL rookies in points when he was sidelined with a broken jaw; a few weeks later the team broke the franchise record of 19 consecutive road-game losses.
Controversies
In 2021 the Blackhawks were sued by a former player who, in 2010, had accused the team’s video coach of sexual assault. An independent investigation subsequently concluded that team officials, including head coach Joel Quenneville, had mishandled the claims, and the general manager resigned before the start of the 2021–22 season.
Activists and others have criticized the team’s name and logos as racist caricatures that harm Native people by reinforcing stereotypes. The team’s primary logo, which depicts a head in profile with feathers in the person’s hair, has been used on its jerseys, with minimal changes, since it began play in 1926. The Blackhawks’ alternate logo includes a pair of crossed tomahawks. The team has said that its name honors the Sauk leader Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, known as Black Hawk, and that it was also inspired by the U.S. Army’s 86th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Blackhawk Division, of which the team’s founder was a member.
The American Indian Center of Chicago broke with the team in the 2010s, stating that it would “have no professional ties with the Blackhawks or any other organization that perpetuates harmful stereotypes.” Protesters painted “LAND BACK” on a sculpture topped by a representation of the logo outside the United Center in 2020. Despite objections, the team’s primary logo has proved enduringly popular within the sport. The Hockey News named it the NHL’s top-ranked logo in 2008 and 2014, and fans voted the team’s jersey the greatest ever in a 2018 online poll organized by the NHL. The Blackhawks jersey was also named the most popular in a 2024 poll of NHL players by The Athletic.