The Stanley Cup has been circulating around the roster of the Chicago Blackhawks this summer as the team celebrates its third title since 2010. It was an exciting season and the Blackhawks are as close to a dynasty as we have going in professional sports right now.
But since Captain Jonathon Toews raised the Cup above his head in front of a raucous crowd that warm June night at the United Center, things haven’t been that great for the “men in the Indian-head sweaters”.
With salary cap issues looming, fans and team members alike knew that major changes were coming. Those changes started in stunning fashion with the trade that sent young star forward Brandon Saad to Columbus. Not long after, Patrick Sharp became a Dallas Star and the ‘Hawks also lost defensemen Johnny Oduya to Dallas.
And then the bombshell dropped.
News reports began to surface in Buffalo early last week that police were investigating Patrick Kane for an incident in his home in the suburbs there August 1st. It was immediately reported as a rape allegation, but more recently as a sexual assault claim.
Kane, 26, had avoided real off-the-ice problems since 2009 when he was arrested for stiffing a cabby in Buffalo in a dispute over 20-cents. He came to the Hawks at the same time as Toews, and the two have become a marketing duo in Chicago unlike any I can remember. “Toews and Kane” is a brand unto its own, and yet individually the two could not be more different.
Toews is known as “Captain Serious”. He is all business. His voice is the one that stops the locker room. He is the first one off the bench and the last one off the ice when the game is over. He is the captain not because he the best player on his team, but because he is what every sports team, business and organization could hope for in a leader.
Kane is the mullet-wearing party boy. He likes the night life and the ladies. He is flamboyant on the ice and off it. He is fast when he skates and he lives in the fast lane everywhere else. He twice was noticeably wasted during Stanley Cup title parades through Chicago, and he is an internet legend for his party prowess.
But then reports started to surface last week that Kane was involved in an incident in his home involving a woman who went to police afterward to file a complaint.
This is a huge concern for the league and the team. With football and basketball players’ arrests making headline news on a regular basis, hockey has prided itself on keeping its rank-and-file out of that lime light. The Blackhawks front office says it is gathering information, but there hasn’t been much in the way of ‘real and legitimate information’ since the story broke (more on that in a minute). Owner Rocky Wirtz says he is ‘disappointed by hopeful’.
Kane was scheduled to have the Cup for a day last Saturday, which he did. But the parade through downtown Buffalo and other appearances that had been scheduled in connection with his day with the Cup were cancelled.
Fans, teammates, coaches and front office personnel all agree: This is NOT good.
But there is a lot more contributing to the cloud that is hovering over the ‘Hawks final few weeks as champs before they begin their quest to repeat at training camp in South Bend.
Like shoddy journalism, for example.
I cannot defend Patrick Kane and what he did that night in his house. Why? Because I have NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED THERE, and neither does anyone else—even those who pretend to know.
News reports that initially surfaced had basically convicted Kane of raping a woman inside his own home last weekend, except for one little problem: he still hasn’t even been arrested yet.
Shame on the media in Buffalo for being so bored out of their minds that they jumped so far offside on this story that if it was a real hockey game, they would move the faceoff back into your own end of the ice.
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The Buffalo News printed quotes from bar employees who described a woman being “very forward and flirtatious” with Kane. It went on to print quotes from those same employees talking about, in detail, how she was allegedly romantically aggressive toward him. Problem #1: We don’t know that it was THAT woman who filed the complaint. It might have been but we don’t know that. Problem #2: We don’t know what transpired between the two after they left the bar. If at any point she decided she didn’t want to “go there”, so had the right to say “NO”. These quotes give the impression that she was ‘asking for it’, which is a bad look for a true journalist.
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Patrick Kane has not be arrested, and thus has not been charged with a crime (at the time of submission of my article for print). Regardless, the story of Kane being in trouble with the law is not at all accurate. YES, he is a public figure and YES he lives to a different standard than us regular people (rightly or wrongly so), but he is in America and until he is proven guilty or enters a plea deal with prosecutors, speculation here is wrong. Did he commit a crime? How the heck would I know! Neither does anyone else and for the media, in traditional and contemporary forms, to run with this story as fact is a violation of the most simple and basic requirements for a journalist: be accurate.
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It is also wrong for the media to assume guilt because neither Kane nor the attorney that he hired has run to a microphone and puked on it his ramblings of his client’s innocence. I find that refreshing. Why don’t we let the facts come in and see where this thing goes? The only harm in that is that reporters will have to park their stories in a file folder in their computers until their initial hunches were confirmed—if they are, in fact, confirmed.
Patrick Kane is the most exciting player with the puck in the National Hockey League—that’s a fact. He’s really good at playing hockey.
But he is equally bad about putting himself in positions to be in trouble. And since none of us know what happened that night, and the police aren’t saying (which is also refreshing), can we just ‘ice the puck’ on the speculation and let the professional investigators do their jobs first.
And between now and then we can hope that people who are paid to cover news and sports actually be ‘professional’ about it.
