The Mutt: an Andrew Shaw primer
Andrew Shaw (aka Shawzer/Shawsy/Sauce/Mutt) is a tiny adorable fighty forward for the Chicago Blackhawks. Getting to the Blackhawks took him a while. It took him three rounds in the draft to get picked; he was passed over completely in his first two years and on his third go, the Blackhawks didn't take him until the fifth round.
But after starting the 2011-12 season with the Ice Hogs, Shaw finally got his call-up to the Blackhawks and played his first NHL game against the Flyers. On his first ever NHL shift, he got into a fight right off the whistle:
And after getting the huge bleeding gash in his forehead patched up, he came back in the second period to pull a Toews and score a goal off his first NHL career shot:
Like a lot of Hawks fans, I pretty much loved Shawsy at first fight, and through the rest of the season and a bunch more goals, fights and ridiculous antics with his teammates, it just got better.
There are two things that you notice immediately about Andrew Shaw. The first is that for a hockey player, at least, he's really short. (5'10", in fact; he's even shorter than Patrick Kane.)
Shawsy completely dwarfed by Blackhawks teammates
Shawsy with teammate and now housemate Jimmy Hayes.
The second is that he loves fighting - and either doesn't notice or doesn't care when he's picking fights with guys way taller than him.
That's Shaw fighting teammate Dan 'Carbomb' Carcillo in practice. It was, incidentally, Carcillo's injury that freed up a spot on the Blackhawks roster and gave Shawsy a chance to play.
Yeah, that's the fight from his first NHL game again. I just love the way Rinaldo skates all the way over from the other side of the faceoff just to punch on with Shawsy. The two of them fought a couple of times when they were teenagers in the OHL together, so it seems like there's some history there.
If you're thinking that this looks like the biggest case of small dog syndrome ever, I completely agree. His Blackhawks teammates actually call him 'Mutt'. That entire article is gold. Shawsy says “Why ‘The Mutt’? Maybe because I’m small? Small and cute and friendly?” I can only imagine the :D at the end. It also includes Kaner calling him a nineteenth-round draft pick and Shawsy describing himself as 'a blue collar guy' and pinpointing the one lone time in his entire hockey career that he's been scared.
But no more of that. SHAWSY ISN'T SCARED OF ANYONE!
Andrew Shaw comes from Belleville, Ontario, and grew up with two brothers who also play hockey. This Chicago Sun Times article tells you just about all you could want to know about Shaw's family and childhood. I'll try not to quote it because I will end up quoting the entire article, but here are the most pertinent #ShawFacts:
- He once punched a trash-talker when he was at some batting cages with his younger brother Jason.
- He once fought his older brother Josh during a ball hockey game because Josh hit Taylor Hall.
- When he was 11, he scored five goals in a single game with a broken hand.
- He was international street hockey player of the year in 2010. I didn't even know that was a thing.
- Okay, just one quote, from his mother: "He wants everything to be like a family." AWWWW.
As a teenager, Shaw played in the OHL for the Niagara Ice Dogs, where he got into enough ridiculous fights to inspire a five minute long fan video:
As you may notice from that video, he also experimented with some terrible hair.
I think this photo also dates from Shawsy's OHL days, though I'm afraid I don't know who his roommate is.
ILU TROLLY.
I'm throwing in an extra fight video here as it might be interesting in future. Here Andrew fighting Garrett "I do not want to punch your helmet" Ross, who was picked up by the Blackhawks in the 2012 draft and became a brief source of interest when he got into a fight at prospect camp.
This TV interview with IceDog!Shawsy is mostly unremarkable, but I love it for one of the questions right at the end: "If you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be?" He answers "chocolate labrador" really quickly and I just love that:
- someone even thought to ask that question;
- Shawsy has clearly thought about this;
- He is wrong, because he would obviously be a terrier, but it's kind of perfect anyway because it makes him a small dog who thinks he's a big dog.
Even though most information about Shaw from his Ice Dog career is about either fighting or being a dog, he obviously played some good hockey with them, even if he got passed over twice in the NHL draft. He got traded to the Owen Sound Attack for the 2010-11 season, where he scored a shitload of goals - many of them with his captain and newfound best bro Garrett Wilson.
This is literally the only photo I have of them together. Oh well.
I won't talk too much about Wilson here because all you really need to know about them is contained in this post. I will just add that I'm not convinced 'bromance' is a strong enough word for a relationship that regularly includes the words 'babe', 'i love u' and 'i miss ur sexy bod like if u never noticed i always stared at u in the room'.
The Attack had been a notoriously terrible team for years, but in 2010-11 they pretty much ruled. In May they actually won the cup and became OHL champions. Shaw didn't play in game 7 because he was suspended for fighting (#Shawtypical) but he was still a big part of getting the team there. Here he is looking slightly unimpressed with the Hardest Working Player award he got at some point during the season.
The Attack were in the Memorial Cup that year as well, but Wilson got concussed and everything went horribly wrong and we won't talk about that. The important thing is that after the 2011 season, SHAWSY FINALLY GOT DRAFTED.
He started the 2011 season with Chicago's AHL affiliate, the Rockford Ice Hogs. I'll come back to talking about the Ice Hogs later, since he's been playing for them again during the lockout. His early months with the Hogs did bring us this, uh, interesting fan story from tumblr:
And, well, this:
Whatever he was doing in Rockford must have worked, because in January 2012 he got called up to the Blackhawks!
He had the aforementioned awesome first game and had a good run for a few weeks after that, getting more minutes and at one point running up a four-game goal streak, including this magnificent one against Detroit:
While that's a particularly flukey example, that goal was pretty typical Shaw. He's good at crashing the net and scoring goals from close in or from rebounds. It's not the only thing he's good at, but it is a key part of his playing style. Along with hitting, chasing the puck relentlessly and insulting people. Here's a more typical example from later in the season, also against the Redwings:
As for positions, while he played as a center for both his OHL teams (and he's been third line center for the Ice Hogs during the lockout) the Blackhawks have pretty much always played him on the wing. Given the Blackhawks' notorious lack of depth at center I'm not entirely sure why they do this, but hey, I'm not an NHL coach.
At any rate, playing on the wing still seems to work for him, because he kicked a lot of NHL ass. Blackhawks fans took to him really quickly and started the Chuck Norris-esque #ShawFacts on twitter, which culminated in Shaw himself tweeting Andrew Shaw loves Chicago and doesn't want to leave. #ShawFact
Unfortunately he did have to leave as he hit a run of bad luck, going scoreless for twelve games and getting sent back to Rockford mid-February. But he made it back in by the end of February and scored Chicago's first goal in his first game back! This time he was also joined by Rockford buddy Brandon Bollig, with whom he hung out and kicked ass and posed for the greatest photoshoot ever.
In one of my favourite moments in the whole 2011-12 season, he and Johnny Oduya scored the game-winning overtime goal against Vancouver in March:
AND THEN THEY HUGGED AND LAUGHED IN LUONGO'S FACE.
As awesome as that game was, things were less awesome during the playoffs in April. The Blackhawks lost their first playoff game against the Phoenix Coyotes, and in game two, Shawsy had a now-infamous run-in with Coyotes goaltender Mike Smith.
Shawsy got suspended three games for the hit, which turned into a HUGE CONTROVERSY because at the time everyone was up in arms about how much violence there'd been in the playoffs so far and whether Brendan Shanahan was doing discipline all wrong but on the other hand maybe penalising a rookie three games for a hit that didn't even injure a guy was overkill. If you want you can watch the Shanaban video and there are a bunch of articles out there about it if you really want; Puck Daddy were pretty even handed, though Bleacher Report were really pissed off. Really.
Shaw was back to playing in Game 6, but the Blackhawks lost and that was the end of their season. SADNESS. Ugh. Let's just look at this photo of Shawsy and Duncan Keith to cheer up:
Much better.
The upside to this is that Shawsy went off to his much-loved cottage in Belleville for the summer, and periodically invited other Blackhawks up to party and go fishing with him at the cottage, so we got lots of photos like this:
And also this:
Sometimes I scroll past that photo when it turns up on my tumblr dash because I have trouble looking directly at it. IT IS TOO MUCH ASS AWESOME FOR ME TO HANDLE.
After summer, of course, the Blackhawks have been locked out, but Shawsy's one of a whole lot of young Hawks who got reassigned to Rockford in the AHL - which has been a whole lot of fun. Shawsy moved into a house with Jimmy Hayes and Nick Leddy (and possibly Marcus Kruger? I'm not sure if he lives there or just visits a lot) which has resulted in many delightful shenanigans.
Visiting factories!
Go karts!
Tweeting photos of Jimmy Hayes while he's asleep! Shaw captioned this one "Don't wake the bear! #cute"
And then they started some kind of rivalry with the Stanton/Pirri/Morin household that involved cook-offs, staring contests and laser tag. Good times. The cookoff part started because Shawsy's housemates and eventually half the team seem to think he is an absolutely amazing cook. If the foodtweets are anything to go by, all his cooking looks exactly like this:
When they aren't busy beating each other at cooking or laser tag, the Ice Hogs sometimes play hockey! Their season's been a bit up and down; they started the season with two losses to the Chicago Wolves and lost a lot to start with, but at one point they worked their way up to the top of their division. And then dropped again. Oh well.
The funny thing is, I'm tempted to say Shaw's been keeping out of trouble this season. He kind of has! He's had way more points than he has fights! It's just that, well, when he did fight he really went all the way.
Yep, he wasn't even on the ice - he jumped the bench to fight when Bordeleau started laying into Dylan Olsen. And then tried to fight off the two refs holding him back. Wade Brookbank, who also left the bench after Shaw did, got a one-game suspension out of it, but Shaw was hit with a whopping six games. As far as I can tell, he mainly used the break to whine about not getting to play hockey. MAYBE DON'T JUMP THE BENCH THEN.
It wasn't all bad, though - he used the time wisely to go visit some hockey players even shorter than him.
And he seemed to like hanging out with Bollig on the sidelines for a few games.
Then he came back and went on a four-game scoring streak. It was awesome. EXCEPT THEN HE GOT SUSPENDED AGAIN UGH. But at least that was the end of the suspensions. He hasn't had the goal streak back, but at least he's NOT SUSPENDED. Meanwhile, Bollig's always racked up a lot of fights, but lately he seems to throw down with anyone who hits Shaw. Okay then, Bollig.
With the lockout coming to an end and training camps about to start, we don't know yet whether Shaw's going to be back on the Blackhawks roster or sticking it out in Rockford for a bit longer. I know that my favourite scrappy, yappy, tiny mutt of a hockey player will be taking hits and scoring goals somewhere, though. For now, in this time of joy and uncertainty, I'll leave you with the spectacularly awful Rockford Ice Hogs Christmas video, in which Shaw wears a leather jacket and a Santa hat and whines about his suspension again.
HAPPY NEW CBA! Okay, fine, a gif for those of you who for some reason don't want to sit through several minutes of hockey players singing.
I mean, how could you not believe that face?
This entry was originally posted at http://halfeatenmoon.dreamwidth.org/503597.html.
But after starting the 2011-12 season with the Ice Hogs, Shaw finally got his call-up to the Blackhawks and played his first NHL game against the Flyers. On his first ever NHL shift, he got into a fight right off the whistle:
And after getting the huge bleeding gash in his forehead patched up, he came back in the second period to pull a Toews and score a goal off his first NHL career shot:
Click to viewLike a lot of Hawks fans, I pretty much loved Shawsy at first fight, and through the rest of the season and a bunch more goals, fights and ridiculous antics with his teammates, it just got better.
There are two things that you notice immediately about Andrew Shaw. The first is that for a hockey player, at least, he's really short. (5'10", in fact; he's even shorter than Patrick Kane.)
Shawsy completely dwarfed by Blackhawks teammates
Shawsy with teammate and now housemate Jimmy Hayes.
The second is that he loves fighting - and either doesn't notice or doesn't care when he's picking fights with guys way taller than him.
That's Shaw fighting teammate Dan 'Carbomb' Carcillo in practice. It was, incidentally, Carcillo's injury that freed up a spot on the Blackhawks roster and gave Shawsy a chance to play.
Yeah, that's the fight from his first NHL game again. I just love the way Rinaldo skates all the way over from the other side of the faceoff just to punch on with Shawsy. The two of them fought a couple of times when they were teenagers in the OHL together, so it seems like there's some history there.
If you're thinking that this looks like the biggest case of small dog syndrome ever, I completely agree. His Blackhawks teammates actually call him 'Mutt'. That entire article is gold. Shawsy says “Why ‘The Mutt’? Maybe because I’m small? Small and cute and friendly?” I can only imagine the :D at the end. It also includes Kaner calling him a nineteenth-round draft pick and Shawsy describing himself as 'a blue collar guy' and pinpointing the one lone time in his entire hockey career that he's been scared.
But no more of that. SHAWSY ISN'T SCARED OF ANYONE!
Andrew Shaw comes from Belleville, Ontario, and grew up with two brothers who also play hockey. This Chicago Sun Times article tells you just about all you could want to know about Shaw's family and childhood. I'll try not to quote it because I will end up quoting the entire article, but here are the most pertinent #ShawFacts:
- He once punched a trash-talker when he was at some batting cages with his younger brother Jason.
- He once fought his older brother Josh during a ball hockey game because Josh hit Taylor Hall.
- When he was 11, he scored five goals in a single game with a broken hand.
- He was international street hockey player of the year in 2010. I didn't even know that was a thing.
- Okay, just one quote, from his mother: "He wants everything to be like a family." AWWWW.
As a teenager, Shaw played in the OHL for the Niagara Ice Dogs, where he got into enough ridiculous fights to inspire a five minute long fan video:
As you may notice from that video, he also experimented with some terrible hair.
I think this photo also dates from Shawsy's OHL days, though I'm afraid I don't know who his roommate is.
ILU TROLLY.
I'm throwing in an extra fight video here as it might be interesting in future. Here Andrew fighting Garrett "I do not want to punch your helmet" Ross, who was picked up by the Blackhawks in the 2012 draft and became a brief source of interest when he got into a fight at prospect camp.
This TV interview with IceDog!Shawsy is mostly unremarkable, but I love it for one of the questions right at the end: "If you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be?" He answers "chocolate labrador" really quickly and I just love that:
- someone even thought to ask that question;
- Shawsy has clearly thought about this;
- He is wrong, because he would obviously be a terrier, but it's kind of perfect anyway because it makes him a small dog who thinks he's a big dog.
Even though most information about Shaw from his Ice Dog career is about either fighting or being a dog, he obviously played some good hockey with them, even if he got passed over twice in the NHL draft. He got traded to the Owen Sound Attack for the 2010-11 season, where he scored a shitload of goals - many of them with his captain and newfound best bro Garrett Wilson.
This is literally the only photo I have of them together. Oh well.
I won't talk too much about Wilson here because all you really need to know about them is contained in this post. I will just add that I'm not convinced 'bromance' is a strong enough word for a relationship that regularly includes the words 'babe', 'i love u' and 'i miss ur sexy bod like if u never noticed i always stared at u in the room'.
The Attack had been a notoriously terrible team for years, but in 2010-11 they pretty much ruled. In May they actually won the cup and became OHL champions. Shaw didn't play in game 7 because he was suspended for fighting (#Shawtypical) but he was still a big part of getting the team there. Here he is looking slightly unimpressed with the Hardest Working Player award he got at some point during the season.
The Attack were in the Memorial Cup that year as well, but Wilson got concussed and everything went horribly wrong and we won't talk about that. The important thing is that after the 2011 season, SHAWSY FINALLY GOT DRAFTED.
He started the 2011 season with Chicago's AHL affiliate, the Rockford Ice Hogs. I'll come back to talking about the Ice Hogs later, since he's been playing for them again during the lockout. His early months with the Hogs did bring us this, uh, interesting fan story from tumblr:
And, well, this:
Whatever he was doing in Rockford must have worked, because in January 2012 he got called up to the Blackhawks!
He had the aforementioned awesome first game and had a good run for a few weeks after that, getting more minutes and at one point running up a four-game goal streak, including this magnificent one against Detroit:
While that's a particularly flukey example, that goal was pretty typical Shaw. He's good at crashing the net and scoring goals from close in or from rebounds. It's not the only thing he's good at, but it is a key part of his playing style. Along with hitting, chasing the puck relentlessly and insulting people. Here's a more typical example from later in the season, also against the Redwings:
As for positions, while he played as a center for both his OHL teams (and he's been third line center for the Ice Hogs during the lockout) the Blackhawks have pretty much always played him on the wing. Given the Blackhawks' notorious lack of depth at center I'm not entirely sure why they do this, but hey, I'm not an NHL coach.
At any rate, playing on the wing still seems to work for him, because he kicked a lot of NHL ass. Blackhawks fans took to him really quickly and started the Chuck Norris-esque #ShawFacts on twitter, which culminated in Shaw himself tweeting Andrew Shaw loves Chicago and doesn't want to leave. #ShawFact
Unfortunately he did have to leave as he hit a run of bad luck, going scoreless for twelve games and getting sent back to Rockford mid-February. But he made it back in by the end of February and scored Chicago's first goal in his first game back! This time he was also joined by Rockford buddy Brandon Bollig, with whom he hung out and kicked ass and posed for the greatest photoshoot ever.
In one of my favourite moments in the whole 2011-12 season, he and Johnny Oduya scored the game-winning overtime goal against Vancouver in March:
AND THEN THEY HUGGED AND LAUGHED IN LUONGO'S FACE.
As awesome as that game was, things were less awesome during the playoffs in April. The Blackhawks lost their first playoff game against the Phoenix Coyotes, and in game two, Shawsy had a now-infamous run-in with Coyotes goaltender Mike Smith.
Shawsy got suspended three games for the hit, which turned into a HUGE CONTROVERSY because at the time everyone was up in arms about how much violence there'd been in the playoffs so far and whether Brendan Shanahan was doing discipline all wrong but on the other hand maybe penalising a rookie three games for a hit that didn't even injure a guy was overkill. If you want you can watch the Shanaban video and there are a bunch of articles out there about it if you really want; Puck Daddy were pretty even handed, though Bleacher Report were really pissed off. Really.
Shaw was back to playing in Game 6, but the Blackhawks lost and that was the end of their season. SADNESS. Ugh. Let's just look at this photo of Shawsy and Duncan Keith to cheer up:
Much better.
The upside to this is that Shawsy went off to his much-loved cottage in Belleville for the summer, and periodically invited other Blackhawks up to party and go fishing with him at the cottage, so we got lots of photos like this:
And also this:
Sometimes I scroll past that photo when it turns up on my tumblr dash because I have trouble looking directly at it. IT IS TOO MUCH ASS AWESOME FOR ME TO HANDLE.
After summer, of course, the Blackhawks have been locked out, but Shawsy's one of a whole lot of young Hawks who got reassigned to Rockford in the AHL - which has been a whole lot of fun. Shawsy moved into a house with Jimmy Hayes and Nick Leddy (and possibly Marcus Kruger? I'm not sure if he lives there or just visits a lot) which has resulted in many delightful shenanigans.
Visiting factories!
Go karts!
Tweeting photos of Jimmy Hayes while he's asleep! Shaw captioned this one "Don't wake the bear! #cute"
And then they started some kind of rivalry with the Stanton/Pirri/Morin household that involved cook-offs, staring contests and laser tag. Good times. The cookoff part started because Shawsy's housemates and eventually half the team seem to think he is an absolutely amazing cook. If the foodtweets are anything to go by, all his cooking looks exactly like this:
When they aren't busy beating each other at cooking or laser tag, the Ice Hogs sometimes play hockey! Their season's been a bit up and down; they started the season with two losses to the Chicago Wolves and lost a lot to start with, but at one point they worked their way up to the top of their division. And then dropped again. Oh well.
The funny thing is, I'm tempted to say Shaw's been keeping out of trouble this season. He kind of has! He's had way more points than he has fights! It's just that, well, when he did fight he really went all the way.
Yep, he wasn't even on the ice - he jumped the bench to fight when Bordeleau started laying into Dylan Olsen. And then tried to fight off the two refs holding him back. Wade Brookbank, who also left the bench after Shaw did, got a one-game suspension out of it, but Shaw was hit with a whopping six games. As far as I can tell, he mainly used the break to whine about not getting to play hockey. MAYBE DON'T JUMP THE BENCH THEN.
It wasn't all bad, though - he used the time wisely to go visit some hockey players even shorter than him.
And he seemed to like hanging out with Bollig on the sidelines for a few games.
Then he came back and went on a four-game scoring streak. It was awesome. EXCEPT THEN HE GOT SUSPENDED AGAIN UGH. But at least that was the end of the suspensions. He hasn't had the goal streak back, but at least he's NOT SUSPENDED. Meanwhile, Bollig's always racked up a lot of fights, but lately he seems to throw down with anyone who hits Shaw. Okay then, Bollig.
With the lockout coming to an end and training camps about to start, we don't know yet whether Shaw's going to be back on the Blackhawks roster or sticking it out in Rockford for a bit longer. I know that my favourite scrappy, yappy, tiny mutt of a hockey player will be taking hits and scoring goals somewhere, though. For now, in this time of joy and uncertainty, I'll leave you with the spectacularly awful Rockford Ice Hogs Christmas video, in which Shaw wears a leather jacket and a Santa hat and whines about his suspension again.
HAPPY NEW CBA! Okay, fine, a gif for those of you who for some reason don't want to sit through several minutes of hockey players singing.
I mean, how could you not believe that face?
This entry was originally posted at http://halfeatenmoon.dreamwidth.org/503597.html.