Damien Cox: Secrets catch up to Chicago Blackhawks organization as another scandal emerges

Ugly secrets. Hard to keep them buried forever.

The Chicago Blackhawks are certainly finding that out.

It took nine years for it to come out, for example, that the Hawks employed a minor-league coach back in 2010, Bill Peters, who liked to shout the n-word to loudly criticize music played by a Black player, Akim Aliu. That truth came out in 2019 and Peters lost his NHL coaching position in Calgary.

The Hawks claimed they never knew anything about Peters’ behaviour. They were never punished in any way, shape or form as an organization. Peters took the full brunt of it all, and that suited the NHL just fine. Gary Bettman likes things contained, as we saw with the one-bad-apple Tim Peel officiating scandal earlier this year.

Around the same time as the Peters-Aliu episode, we are now learning, the Hawks may also have been home to even more scandalous behaviour. During their run to the 2010 Stanley Cup, the Hawks learned of accusations towards a video coach named Brad Aldrich. Two Chicago players have said they were sexually assaulted by Aldrich and are suing.

Paul Vincent, who was working for the team at the time as a skills coach, told the team’s upper management about the allegations. Vincent said the team, led by president John McDonagh, refused to file a report with the Chicago police sex crimes unit. Instead, Aldrich was quietly let go after celebrating the Cup triumph over Philadelphia with the rest of the organization.

Aldrich went on to other hockey jobs, including a role as a volunteer high school coach where he was charged and convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct and sent to prison for nine months.

Two civil suits, and some good reporting by several media organizations, have brought all this to light in recent days. The NHL’s response has been to say it is supporting an “independent” investigation recently announced by the hockey club, which makes you wonder just how independent it will be. “Let us see what the investigation reveals, and then we can figure out what comes next,” said Bettman.

So right around the time the Hawks were about to become the NHL’s “model” franchise, a flagship team that would be asked to play in multiple outdoor games because of its high profile and would win three Stanley Cups in six years, there were some nasty secrets brewing inside the organization.

At the very least, it appears the Blackhawks may have failed to do the right thing with Aldrich, which was to inform police of the sex allegations against a member of their organization. Instead, they let him quietly leave and go on to other hockey positions, including positions where he worked with minors.

McDonagh is gone, but Stan Bowman, now president of hockey operations and general manager, and Al MacIsaac, senior vice-president of hockey operations, were there when the team was dealing with the Aldrich situation and are still there. This week, Montreal Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin, who used to work for the Hawks, denied any knowledge of the scandal.

According to various reports, many players in the organization were well aware of the accusations against Aldrich. But the front office didn’t know?

These are tricky P.R. times for the Hawks. They’ve fallen far from their former pedestal as the most successful organization in the league, which was bound to happen in the salary cap era. Since winning their last Cup in 2015, the Hawks have missed the playoffs twice, including this year, and lost in the first round three times.

Long-time stalwarts like Corey Crawford, Marian Hossa and Brent Seabrook are gone. Duncan Keith is rumoured to be on the trading block. It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that this just happened to be the week captain Jonathan Toews emerged to tell his story about his fight against chronic immune response syndrome. Toews’ reputation in the sport is impeccable, and his multiple media appearances this week helped the team change the subject from the Aldrich scandal.

It’s unlikely to last long. Nor will it stem the growing criticism of the continued use of the head of an Indigenous man in war paint as the team’s primary logo. The team continues to insist this logo pays tribute to Black Hawk, a former Saux chief, when it fact the founder of the team named the hockey club after his First World War artillery unit. It really is one of the biggest lies in sport.

While schools like McGill University and the University of North Dakota, along with professional teams like the Washington Football Team and the Edmonton Elks, have dumped their indigenous nicknames and cartoonish logos, the Hawks continue to cling to their appalling logo like a religious relic. At a time when hundreds of graves of former Indigenous students at Canadian residential schools are being discovered and the NHL is supposed to be preaching diversity and racial tolerance, Chicago’s ongoing use of its logo is an ugly reminder of hockey’s racist past.

The Aldrich scandal is clearly the most sensitive topic for the Hawks right now, particularly the questions surrounding what people like Bowman knew, and what they did with their knowledge. Perhaps this investigation will make that clear. Interestingly, on Thursday the NFL fined the Washington Football Team $10 million for a “highly unprofessional” workplace environment. Perhaps the NHL might wish to announce a similar review of the workplace in Chicago.

This is like a professional athlete being portrayed as a squeaky clean family man, then being caught doing things they shouldn’t be doing. Well, the same goes for franchises. Toronto hockey fans learned that about the pedophile ring that once operated out of Maple Leaf Gardens. Chicago’s hockey team clearly has serious questions to answer, and on more than one front.

The Hawks undoubtedly hoped their secrets were buried forever. But it never works that way.

Damien Cox is a former Star sports reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @DamoSpin