What Toews, other NHL'ers have been up to with season on hold

With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc around the globe, video conference calls have become perhaps the best way for everyone to keep in touch with family and loved ones.

They are also being utilized by the NHL, which conducted eight such calls over the past six days, giving fans an opportunity to hear from some of their favorite players.

The seventh call came Tuesday and featured the Blackhawks' Jonathan Toews, St. Louis' Alex Pietrangelo and Nashville's Roman Josi.

Over the course of 30 minutes, we learned that these three captains aren't exactly big readers, that Toews is loving the third season of Ozark and that Pietrangelo has his hands full with three kids and two dogs. When the call's host disappeared, the trio also did a solid job of improvising for about 90 seconds by talking about life just like you would with three old buddies.

We're splitting this session up into two parts: The first will deal with what their life is like in the coronavirus world; the second will deal with more hockey-related questions.

Q: How are you holding up and where are you?

Josi: I'm in Nashville in my house. My wife is here, got two dogs. "Same as everyone - staying home as much as we can. Playing with the dogs and trying to work out at home.

Toews: Same, I'm just here in Chicago with my girlfriend and a little Yorkie and that's about it. So it's pretty quiet compared to (Pietrangelo's) house it sounds like.

Pietrangelo: Yeah, it's a little loud over here. Three kids, two dogs, wife. Trying to stay inasmuch as we can, trying to be careful. ... I'll tell you what, the kids can do some damage in the house in a two-week span if you keep 'em inside too long.

Q: What are your days like?

Pietrangelo: I was laughing last night because I said, 'There's not enough time in the day.' I'm not even working right now and I can't even find enough time to do something for myself.

We wake up, eat breakfast, I have my morning coffee. So does my wife. Today we watched the Good Dinosaur, went upstairs (and) played a bit. ...

(Now) they're going to go outside, then they'll take a nap. Do the same thing in the afternoon, wake up and do it all over again tomorrow.

Toews: I moved into a new place during the season. I think you guys can all agree (that) during the year you kind of put a lot on the back burner with how busy the schedule was and all that. Just catching up. Calling some friends. You know, little things I don't really have time to do when we're in season.

Q: Toews was asked to talk about wishing Belvidere's Declan Dassie a happy seventh birthday on the Today show:

Toews: Yeah, yeah. I guess at some point we'll see our little buddy Declan there. (There was a) sign that he held up at one of our postgame show(s) where it said something like: "I'll never give up." It's great to see that we've got some little fans out there that are sticking with us through thick and thin. So I decided to send him a little message.

(Toews also added this little zinger for the host who mispronounced his name: "Thought I heard all the different pronunciations of my name, but 'Tay-vits' or something? That was a new one. So it was pretty funny.")

Q: Jonathan, which teammate would you most want to be quarantined with and which teammate would you least want to be quarantined with?

Toews chose Crawford for most: "He's kind of an easy-going guy. Whatever you want to do, he's down for whatever.

"Least? Since I roomed with him for so long, I'd have to say Kaner. There were some ups and downs through that relationship there."

Q: What would your message be to the fans?

Toews: Well, first of all we love our fans. We miss 'em. We miss seeing everybody at the United Center. Obviously this is a crazy time and a tough time for everybody.

The biggest thing we can learn probably is no matter what your background, what your political views are, I think we're all coming together on this. That's the biggest thing.

You guys all know what it takes to have a winning hockey team. You have to have everybody come together. That's the biggest message right now, is coming together with your family, your friends, your community and wait this thing out.

We've got to do what we've got to do and we'll get through it.