ELMONT, N.Y. — There was no florid, flowery speech about banding together and salvaging a season. No slow-simmering narrative that gradually but dramatically rose to a boil of passion and cheers. Not even a slow-clap moment. This wasn’t a Disney movie. Anders Sorensen is not a Disney coach.
“I’m a pretty simple man,” he said on Wednesday. “I’m pretty black and white.”
And, well, that was just fine, because the Blackhawks didn’t need rhetoric during that first full meeting with their new interim head coach. Didn’t need dramatics and histrionics. All they needed to hear were solutions — solutions to their dormant offense, their porous defense, their inability to hold leads, their inability to rally late, their inability to string together any wins at all.
And while Sorensen didn’t have poetry, he did have solutions. He walked into that room and got right to the Xs and Os. He said the Blackhawks were going to go on the offensive. The forwards were going to forecheck with a purpose, the defensemen were going to join the rush. The Blackhawks were going to seek transition out of their own end rather than fear transition toward their own end. There’d be quick exits through orderly slot protection, more organized breakouts, cleaner play through the neutral zone. The Blackhawks were going to be more dynamic. More fun. More successful.
That’s it. That’s all he really had to say. That’s how a 49-year-old coach who never got higher than the ECHL as a player and never got higher than the AHL as a coach — a guy who had never participated in an NHL game in any way, who attended the last Winter Classic at Wrigley Field as a fan — wins over a room full of grizzled NHL veterans. By offering them hope. By offering them a way out of last place.
The Blackhawks, to a man, have blamed themselves for getting Luke Richardson fired. But they also were more than ready for a new voice — no matter how inexperienced that voice was.
“He doesn’t have to win us over,” Taylor Hall said. “We’re all in this together, right? We need to support him as much as he’s supporting us. And not to pile on the previous coach, but I think there were some adjustments that needed to be made — and that are being made — that are really going to help us play well. I’m looking forward to the future. We have a way better team than we’ve shown and I really feel like you’re going to start to see that now, game by game. It’s not going to be a 2-1 loss every night, a 3-2 loss. You’re going to see us put up three, four, five goals on a lot of nights when we start getting a handle on everything and everyone gets in sync.”
It’s been a rather remarkable transition, the Blackhawks so quickly accepting Richardson’s firing and embracing Sorensen’s promotion. It doesn’t always happen so easily, so seamlessly, for a rookie coach.
When Jeremy Colliton took over for Joel Quenneville in the fall of 2018, he was greeted with open arms by the younger Blackhawks who had played for him in Rockford and loved him for his open communication and respected him for his hockey intelligence. But Colliton got something of a cold shoulder from the veterans, the Quenneville loyalists who had won one, two or three Stanley Cup championships under the second-winningest coach in NHL history. Colliton was some 33-year-old newbie most of them had never heard of, and the older Blackhawks were wary.
Patrick Kane was the first of the core players to come around on Colliton, and that made a huge difference. But Colliton always seemed to be swimming upstream, always trying to prove himself, to establish himself as the authority, to win over the entire room.
Colliton had even less time in Rockford than Sorensen did, but at least he was a former player, a second-round pick and two-time member of Canada’s world juniors team who saw intermittent NHL time over five seasons before concussions derailed his career. Derek King had never worked behind an NHL bench when he took over for Colliton in November of 2021, but he was a three-time 30-goal scorer over an excellent 830-game NHL career. That gave him instant credibility with players young and old.
Sorensen, meanwhile, played 37 games as a defenseman in the ECHL during the 1999-2000 season after a very brief stint with something called the Tupelo T-Rex of the Western Professional Hockey League. That’s it. That was his career.
So how does he step into a locker room with an MVP (Hall), a three-time champion (Pat Maroon), a two-time captain (Nick Foligno) and one of the most hyped young players in hockey history (Connor Bedard) and tell them how to play the game?
“Hey, some of the best coaches that ever coached never played, right?” Maroon said.
Maroon should know. Yes, he’s played for Craig Berube and Richardson, with nearly 2,500 NHL games played between them. But he’s also played for Bruce Boudreau and Jon Cooper, two of the most successful coaches of the modern era, the first of whom had a very modest career as a player and the second of whom didn’t have one at all.
Of course, by the time Maroon got to their teams, they were long-established coaches in the world’s best league. They had earned a certain level of authority, of respect. Sorensen, quite frankly, had not.
But it hasn’t taken long for him to do so.
“He has a really good knack for the game,” Maroon said. “He’s really smart, really intelligent. He’s really good with Xs and Os and details. He knows what he’s talking about and he’s holding guys accountable. That’s the biggest thing. He holds guys to a standard, and he says what needs to be said. I saw it right away in the first meeting.”
Intensity and accountability. pic.twitter.com/GLx3nMhl1v
— Chicago Blackhawks (@NHLBlackhawks) December 6, 2024
Connor Murphy, now on his fifth Blackhawks coach in his eighth Blackhawks season, said players are naturally skeptical of anyone who walks into their room and tries to change the way things are done. But Sorensen’s direct style of speaking, attention to detail, willingness to call out players and openness to listening helped him pass the smell test almost immediately.
“Guys that have been around the league, they can sniff out a coach by how he treats them as a player and as a person, by the things that hold weight with him, the roles they use guys in and the accountability they demand from all the teammates,” Murphy said. “Guys have had enough coaches to know whether someone is pushing the cart forward.”
The second episode of TNT’s “Road to the Winter Classic” featured general manager Kyle Davidson introducing Sorensen to the locker room. Sorensen was almost comically brief in his remarks, starting with, “Yeah, I don’t have too much” before a quick comment about “making competing fun.” The Xs and Os and system changes came at the first real meetings last Friday. One was with the full team, and another was with the veteran leadership group — guys like Foligno, Hall, Maroon, Seth Jones and Murphy.
In those meetings, Sorensen got into the nitty-gritty of how he was going to wring more offense out of an underachieving group. But he also got into more detail about what he meant by “making competing fun.”
“The biggest thing is effort, and enjoying the competitiveness and energy that comes from effort, in practices and in games,” Murphy said. “The message I took is, it’s not about effort being an angry punishment, that you have to work harder. It’s more like, hey, we’re going to enjoy working harder because it’s going to give us more results and band us together. It’s going to give us confidence in how we’re playing, and that’s going to turn the page (on the coaching change) more than anything. Effort and fun go hand-in-hand. They feed off each other. And then we work our details into that.”
The message seems to have resonated. Sorensen’s first game was a pretty rough draw: the Winnipeg Jets after just one practice. But after that 4-2 loss, the Blackhawks walked into Madison Square Garden on Monday and combined all these concepts and details — effort, forecheck, quick transitions, activating defensemen — into a cathartic 2-1 victory over the New York Rangers. If not for Igor Shesterkin, there might have been those three, four or five goals Hall is now expecting.
And if there are any secret Sorensen skeptics still lurking in the Blackhawks’ dressing room, the quickest way to win respect is to win games.
Sorensen basically shrugged when asked what gives him the confidence to walk into an NHL room and take control, to tell these hardened, highly accomplished veterans what to do and how to play, when they’ve gotten so much further than he ever did as a player. He said some of it comes from picking the brains of elite players with whom he’s worked in the past as a developmental coach. But mostly, it’s just his personality. He’s not easily intimidated.
Even when he probably should be.
“They want to win,” Sorensen said. “They have pride. A lot of them have won Cups. They’re not happy with how we were playing, and they want to win. When you present (that) we’re all in this together for that reason, it’s a common goal, and they were excited about that.”
Sorensen is the fourth straight Blackhawks coach to take the job without any NHL head coaching experience, following Colliton, King and Richardson. Given the lack of success all three of his predecessors have had, it makes Sorensen a bit of a long shot to keep the job on a permanent basis, especially given how many experienced names could be available after the season.
But Sorensen will be the head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks for another 54 games. Fifty-four games to prove himself to Davidson, to Blackhawks fans, to the NHL at large.
And hey, just two games in, he already seems to have won over the toughest crowd of all — his players.
“Sometimes a new voice is good,” Maroon said. “Luke was great. I wish him all the best. But sometimes a new voice can change things. Anders has done a really good job in Rockford, and all the young guys love him. And we vets already love him, too.”
(Top photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
