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As he sat in the road locker room of Wells Fargo Arena, lacing up his skates for Game 6 of the 2010 Stanley Cup Final, Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Sharp could have had a million things running through his head. At the front of his mind had to be the fact that his team was one win away from the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title in 49 years.
The fact they were just one game away from the peak doesn’t begin to tell the story though. When Sharp was acquired by the Blackhawks in 2005, the team was 10-14-2 and out of a playoff spot. The average number of fans packing into the Madhouse on Madison was 13,318, good enough for second-worst in all of hockey. Of course, this coincided with team owner Bill Wirtz blacking out home games on television so that fans would have to go to games live. That didn’t work.
Sharp played in front of empty crowds at home routinely as he got used to being a member of the Blackhawks. The team was a perennial doormat of the league despite being a once-proud franchise, and there was little Sharp could do despite his talent, which was apparent even then.
Then in 2006, with the third overall pick, the Blackhawks took a talented player out of the University of North Dakota named Jonathan Toews. Chicago followed that up in 2007 by taking winger Patrick Kane first overall in the NHL Draft. Those two players would forever change Sharp’s experience as a Blackhawks player and his career as a whole.
Both Toews and Kane debuted in the 2007-08 NHL season and started to excite Blackhawks fans about hockey again. It’s no coincidence they went from 29th in the league in attendance in 2005-06 to first in average attendance by the 2008-09 season.
Sharp had experienced the bottom of the barrel in terms of excitement in Chicago. Now, with Kane, Toews and a host of other talented players, he was playing on a team that was winning and taking the Windy City by storm. So it makes sense why Sharp might have thought about how far he had come before skating onto the ice at Wells Fargo Arena.
Of course, the Blackhawks went on to win the Stanley Cup in overtime of Game 6 of the 2010 Cup Final in dramatic fashion. It must have felt like the end of a long road for Sharp. If only he knew it was just the beginning. Five years later, the Blackhawks have two more Stanley Cups and Sharp was a big part of each run, whether he was producing on the ice or leading in the locker room. Overall Sharp scored 229 goals and assisted on 267 more for Chicago.
More importantly, he withstood a change in the Blackhawks organization that nobody else on the team went through. Kane and Toews helped facilitate the change, so they never really saw how bad things could get. Nobody else on the Stanley Cup roster had experienced quite what Sharp had in reaching the pinnacle of the sport. But he took things in stride and waited for better days, which turned into better years as the Blackhawks became hockey’s newest dynasty with him at the center of everything.
With Kane and Toews’ $10.5 million contracts kicking in next season, Sharp became a casualty of the salary cap as he was traded to the Dallas Stars. In his last game in a Blackhawks uniform, he got to hoist the Stanley Cup. When he was traded to Chicago at 24, it was probably the last outcome he imagined.
As he continues his career elsewhere, Blackhawks fans should appreciate just how much Sharp went through in Chicago and how much he meant to the team that re-energized the Second City. No matter where he goes as his career winds down, there will always be a place in Chicago for Patrick Sharp.
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