Blackhawks’ Connor Murphy desperately wants to win, but will he be in Chicago to see it?

Hockey is a sport of routine, populated by creatures of habit. On game nights, the players eat the same meal at the same time, after the same nap, before the same warm-up. They lace their skates the same way, they psych themselves up with the same mantras and they fist-bump their captain in the same manner as they hit the ice.

Training camp is no different. Players go through the same workouts, coaches spout the same platitudes, reporters ask the same questions. And so, on Thursday morning, for what felt like the umpteenth straight September, Connor Murphy and I talked about his career-long playoff drought.

The venerable Blackhawks defenseman, by far the longest-tenured player as he enters his ninth season in Chicago (no one else has more than three full seasons), has played in 745 regular-season games over 11 NHL seasons but has never played in a Stanley Cup playoff game.

Not a real one, at least. Technically speaking, he’s been in nine playoff games. However, all of them were played in an empty Rogers Place in Edmonton during the 2020 bubble postseason. Heck, it took an expanded one-time-only playoff format for the Blackhawks even to get there. Murphy doesn’t count those. He wants to play in a real playoff game, in a real playoff atmosphere.

However, at 32 and in the last year of his Blackhawks contract, Murphy’s perspective has shifted a little bit. He no longer wants to make the playoffs for himself. He desperately wants to make the playoffs for Chicago.

For you.

Murphy might have been born in Ohio, but he’s a true Chicagoan now, having lived here full time since the summer of 2017. And in that time, the sports landscape in the city has been bleak. The Bears are on their third can’t-miss first-round quarterback. The White Sox endured the worst season in baseball history. The Bulls are a model of mediocrity, barely a blip on the radar. And the Blackhawks have gone from the league’s model franchise to a perennial cellar-dweller — a couple of times on purpose.

“Luckily, the Cubs are in the playoffs now,” Murphy said with a smile. “But that’s what’s been the hardest part of all of it. It sounds cheesy, but every year, I’ve realized more and more how big of a sports town it is, and how much the people are craving success again.”

That’s why, of the Blackhawks’ 391 losses since Murphy’s arrival from Arizona, the one that sticks in his craw the most was a 6-2 loss to the St. Louis Blues last season. It was a nondescript loss, but it came in a setting that was anything but. The Blackhawks stepped out of the dugout at Wrigley Field and struck out, fouling a few pitches off their faces in the process. It was embarrassing. And for Murphy, it was dispiriting.

“That’s what ate me up the most in the Winter Classic last year,” Murphy said. “We were having a losing season again, but we had this big stage to put on a show and maybe get a win and get the city’s camaraderie up a bit, and it just didn’t happen. That ate at me. Knowing the season’s going a certain way and you’re not going to be able to make the playoffs is one thing, but not even being able to put on a show for that one night was (tough).

“That’s what’s eaten at me the most — so many years of not being able to be that team, to be the ones everyone’s following and rooting for more than all the other teams.”

The Blackhawks won’t be that team this season, either. However, they might someday be that team again. And the way things are progressing, it might even happen before the Bears, Bulls or Sox get there again.

That’s been the whole point of Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson’s aggressive tanking and draft-pick hoarding the past few years. It’s a long-term rebuild for long-term success. And now, when Murphy looks around the locker room and sees the likes of Connor Bedard, Frank Nazar, Artyom Levshunov, Sam Rinzel, Alex Vlasic and so many others, he can’t help but get excited about the Blackhawks’ future.

However, there’s the rub. Nobody in the Blackhawks organization wants to see the team return to contention as badly as Murphy does. He desperately wants that first real playoff game to happen in the United Center, to be the one guy who played playoff games behind both Kane/Toews and Bedard/Nazar, to see this whole thing through to its idyllic conclusion.

Yet now that it’s just starting to get a little exciting around here, just beginning to feel a little more real, Murphy very well could be on the way out. He’s a well-respected, well-liked 32-year-old defensive defenseman in the last year of his contract, with a manageable cap hit of $4.4 million.

In other words, he’s trade bait. And he knows it.

“That’s the nature of anyone’s career,” he said. “I came here at the tail end of when the team was succeeding, and we started to go downhill when I got here. But that’s the nature of any player. When you’re in a rebuild, by the time the team gets good, you’re either on a different team or you’re retired.”

That’s not to say Murphy couldn’t be a valuable player for the Blackhawks for years to come. However, he’s already seen the wave of 23-and-under defensemen crash on the shore of Lake Michigan, and he can feel the rip tide tugging at his toes. Murphy joked that there’s been so much turnover during his time in Chicago that he and his wife, Kristina, have to sit down each fall and see which of their friends are left to hang out with.

That turnover has hit the blue line the hardest, and all of those guys are hunting for a permanent spot in the lineup — Vlasic, Levshunov, Rinzel, Wyatt Kaiser, Kevin Korchinski, Louis Crevier, Nolan Allan, Ethan Del Mastro, with more on the way. Progress waits for no man.

With age comes wisdom, though. And as the longest-tenured Blackhawks player, Murphy already commanded respect in the room. However, his experience has been particularly valuable for the young defensemen.

“He’s the big mentor for the guys on the back end,” said Allan, whose game perhaps most resembles Murphy’s in the bunch. “He’s an easy guy to talk to and he’s been in the league a long time. Any advice from him really helps.”

Murphy said he’s not dwelling on what might happen in February or March. In fact, he went so far as to say that one of the perks of having an all-new coaching staff is that there’s so much to learn and so much to process that his mind is too occupied to wander. So while his future and his role in Blackhawks history — fallow-period footnote or the one bridge between two golden eras — hang in the balance, Murphy’s going to do what he’s always done: work hard for himself, for his teammates and for his adopted city.

Because, look, Murphy knows what being truly down and out in the hockey world feels like. And this, frustrating as it’s been, ain’t it. Remember: This man was a member of the Arizona Coyotes.

“When I was in Arizona, we didn’t even have an owner,” he said. “We had an unstable situation, and we had vets that were in the last couple years of their careers, knowing that the team wasn’t going anywhere. But what I appreciate is that they gave me a lot. One, they played well to make me look better. And two, they’d take me out to dinner, they’d talk to me on the bench, they’d help me relax and take off the stress when I was getting healthy-scratched.

“They didn’t have to do that in a losing season, but they did. So that’s kind of where I’m at now. Things change, and you know it’s a business, but whatever happens — and it’s such a broken-record thing to say — you just control what you can. You play your best and you be the best teammate you can be.”

And when the Blackhawks finally do get back in the conversation in Chicago, when the Stanley Cup playoffs finally return to the United Center, few people will appreciate it and revel in it as much as Murphy — whenever that is, and wherever he is.

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