Look Everyone, A Wirtz Is Talking

It's now an October tradition, before he goes back into hiding as the losses pile up.

I guess we'll just have to get used to every October, Danny Wirtz will make his media rounds, espouse optimism about a rebuild that he doesn't seem to think he has any control over, and try to shed some sunshine on his TV channel that he should have never gotten involved with in the first place (though he probably had little choice by the time he fully took control of the team).

So it is again with Danny, as he sat down with The Athletic and Scott Powers (after sitting down with other outlets) to give, what I can only assume, is his annual State Of The Hawks address. There isn't much to chew on here, as Wirtz has become better and better at talking without saying anything. It probably helps that he was the organization's mouthpiece before he became the owner. That doesn't mean there's nothing, though. And we gon' find it!

"I have an amazing collection of like Starter and sort of vinyl jackets, letterman jackets. I have one that’s probably this big with my name embroidered on it from the ’70s. I have like a lot of that stuff, you know, old jerseys, old Gunzo’s memorabilia..."

This is why I'll always find it hard to be 100 percent mad at Danny, because he clearly was the same Hawks dork I was, that you were, when we were kids. I had a Hawks starter jacket. I was the shithead wearing it when it was 65 degrees outside (making a fun parallel to what I am now, as I was just getting shit for showing up to a patio party on Saturday in shorts). I had more shit with "Gunzo's" on it than I had any right to, considering I didn't play hockey as a kid. Somewhere, deep down within Danny, he gets what we all say about the Hawks. He has to. He couldn't be this level of dweeb without being able to.

From there, Danny is asked about being the fourth generation Wirtz to become owner of the Hawks.

I think the word that I hold onto that is sort of a consistent through the generations is stewardship. Stewardship means you sort of take care of things while you have the opportunity. I think that goes into a lot of different areas. Of course, taking care of the organization and making sure the business is healthy, the team is healthy, players, the relationships with all the folks that we need to have relationships with, from partners to media to alumni. Those are the kind of things, when you love and care for something, you’re responsible for it and therefore you steward it. So I think that’s been a consistent.

And, of course, each generation has had their own mark in terms of their specific contributions or decisions that changed the trajectory of the team or in many cases, the league. My grandfather was a huge piece of the board of governors and the expansion and sort of the growth of the game. That was one of his unique contributions. Of course, my dad’s legacy. Everybody sort of made their mark, but also everybody takes that same level of responsibility and stewardship to continue to keep this.

It's funny, for as much as I bitch about Danny and his tenure so far, it's clear that running the Hawks means something to him, which I wasn't always convinced it did. In a town where we see the Cubs treated merely like a thing by their owners, and the Sox and Bulls treated as something to insult the very people who love them by Reinsdorf, I suppose we should all take a little more time to appreciate that the Hawks are owned and run by someone to whom it really does mean something.

That doesn't mean he should be absolved, of course. Running the Hawks meant a lot to Bill Wirtz, and he ran them into the ground. It's curious to see Danny talk about stewardship and carrying on some sort of family tradition, because his father's stewardship of the Hawks was mostly about pissing all over his grandfather's stewardship. We don't have to rehash the whole thing, but most of us remember Rocky kind of usurping control of the Hawks after Bill's death from his brother (where the hell is he, anyway?) and then taking about five minutes to undo some of the strongest tenets that Bill had run the Hawks by. He certainly wasn't wrong to do so, but it certainly marked him out from Bill, who ran the Hawks almost as an homage to his father, Arthur. Rocky wasn't as nearly interested in legacy, or at least Wirtz legacy.

Anyway, Danny certainly has less to change from his father (though not nothing). Certainly, each Wirtz has had unique challenges just because times and landscapes change, and they obviously haven't met all of them with aplomb. Just a nugget.

...how we can continue to build on the originality that we’re known for and invent, reinvent parts of the game or parts of how we run the business, how we grow the sport in the community...

Oh, buddy. Look, the Hawks were certainly very successful in the 2010s, but nothing about what they did was original. If Danny can realize this, he'll have a much better chance of actually doing something original.

From there, it's the usual argle bargle about the rebuild, with Danny channeling Terry Bevington and telling us the reason he is confident is because he has a lot of confidence and pipelines and development and all the other stuff you could recite from memory by this point. I hardly expect Danny to be breaking down tape and telling me about zone exits, so he's just going to regurgitate what he's been told by the people he employs. Fine. No one wants an owner getting that involved. Except...

I’m as anxious as anyone. I would love to be able to press a button and have it happen right now.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FOR THE GUYS WHO DID THIS!

It doesn't fill one's heart with hope that if something goes sideways this season or the next that Danny is going to be able to recognize that and move on from the people responsible. You're the owner, dawg. Top cheese. Head honcho. Man with the plan and all that. If anyone gets to press a button to speed this up, it's you.

We’re not going to rush players. We’re not going to push things faster than they need to be. We’re not going to look for shortcuts.

This is where my eyes glaze, because it feels like Danny and Kyle can say exactly this, have said exactly this, and it's their get out of jail free card for an indeterminate amount of time. They could be still saying this in three years. Hawks finish with 65 points this season? Well, we're not rushing the players who could improve that. Finish with 75 and look somewhat promising but then make no moves next summer? We're not rushing. Stall out next season? We're not rushing. What is the deadline when this goes from not rushing to "Maybe some of these guys aren't good enough?" We have no idea, and it sounds like they don't, either.

Now it’s our job on the business side to make sure we can keep up with the rising player costs by all means. It’s all an indication of a healthy league, which is great. So, we know what we have to do on the business side to keep pace.

This is not the first time that Danny has brought up "the challenge" of keeping up with the rising cap. His last name is still "Wirtz," which means my antennae are always up for bullshit (I've been hearing it for nearly 40 years now from three of them), and if I didn't know better I'd swear this was prepping the ground for not being a cap team one day soon, when the Hawks should be to compete. I ain't fer sure yet on that, but he keeps putting it in the bloodstream.

I feel that Kyle has also surrounded himself and others within hockey ops to really think strategically about the cap and how and when all of the factors and decisions we make around roster composition and resulting salary plays into our team’s success. 

See?

It’s challenging. Business is challenging all over the place these days. I can speak on behalf of all of our businesses. It’s a competitive world. You’re fighting for attention and entertainment dollars, all those kinds of things. The good news is our business is healthy right now. Despite the team performance, we have a really healthy business from sponsorship to tickets and all the things that come from that, so I feel really good there. But it just continues to put more pressure on (president of business operations) Jaime (Faulkner) and the team to sort of find new ways to generate revenue, to continue to keep pace so that we can continue to pay our players and stay competitive.

Jamie on notice?

From there, there's a lot of discussion about CHSN and getting on Comcast finally and the difference that has made. I'm still fairly sure that CHSN was kind of dumped on Danny by the time he got the reins, and even if he wanted to get out of it and try something new, he probably couldn't have. That doesn't make it a good idea, as RSNs were dying long before Reinsdorf and Wirtz III were cooking CHSN up. And Danny could have done a lot more creatively to try and get CHSN out there more than he did. Feeds into that whole "be original" thing from above.

Anyway, that's our Wirtz sighting for the year. Hope everyone enjoyed it. It'll be a while until the next one.