The Chicago Blackhawks are entering a new era on the ice led by Connor Bedard, but they're also transitioning to a new one off of it: Danny Wirtz has officially inherited the franchise and holds the title of chairman and CEO after the passing of his father Rocky Wirtz.
On the surface level, it doesn't sound like too much is going to change. Rocky had been preparing Danny for this moment in recent years, although it unfortunately wasn't expected to come this quickly.
On a deeper level, I'm sure there will be additional responsibilities that Danny will take on as he gets situated into the role, both with the Blackhawks and the Breakthru Beverage business. But his dad made him ready for it.
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"That's really a testament to Rocky's kind of planful approach to things, is there shouldn't be much change on a day to day level," Wirtz said on the latest Blackhawks Talk Podcast. "Since I took on the role as interim president, I got a chance to obviously get to know the organization more and we've put forth a lot of changes over the last three years. So a lot of that work was well underway.
"Rocky, in the last year or so, definitely had played the role as mentor-coach. A lot of people like to think about this as some sort of hierarchical structure, but the reality was, we sat around a table as collaborators, and if anything, we use Rocky to sort of ask questions, get insights as to, are we making the right choice here? He would ask a lot of questions, but it wasn't a sort of rigid approvals and things like that. He always empowered me, empowered Jaime [Faulkner] and Kyle [Davidson] to make the right decisions for the organization, so I think those practical things should be unchanged.
"The sad thing is just, we won't have that counsel, we won't have that wisdom that he brought to the table. So that's the thing we'll probably miss, but for fans and for what people kind of expect from the organization, we started our plans several years back and we're going to continue to execute year on year and build a championship team."
You can listen to the full interview here:
