Quenneville, Dineen Reunite With Hartford Whalers Fans

Former Hartford Whalers players and current Chicago Blackhawks coaches Joel Quenneville and Kevin Dineen meet with Hartford Whalers fans in Long Island before the Blackhawks-New York Islanders game at Nassau Coliseum on Saturday, December 13, 2014. (Photo Credit: Peter Hindle)

When Chicago Blackhawks head coach Joel Quenneville and his assistant Kevin Dineen were teammates on the Hartford Whalers back in the 1980’s, they were beloved by the fan base. And it was not only for what they did on the ice, but for how decent they were to the Hartford community off of it.

Three decades later, little has changed.

The Hartford Whalers Booster Club still exists and it, along with many other Whalers fans, scheduled a bus trip to the Nassau Coliseum to watch the Blackhawks play the New York Islanders. It’s not the first time they’ve made the trip to Long Island, either. They went last year as well to show the hockey world that both their desire for a return to the NHL and the Spirit of Pucky was still alive and well in Hartford.

Nassau Coliseum is a good choice both due to its proximity to central Connecticut and also that the Isles are not the Rangers, whose divisive, uninvited AHL affiliate remaining in Hartford for years has done this hockey market no favors.  And so the venue currently hosting the 4-time Stanley Cup Champion Islanders is a perfect fit.

Along on this trip to Uniondale, New York was Pete Hindle, an Examiner.com reporter who covers Hartford hockey. Hindle also wrote a story about this event, and  as such I asked him for his thoughts on the experience.

He told me that he was very impressed that such a highly successful, two-time Stanley Cup winning NHL coach and his accomplished assistant took the time to visit with fans of the long-defunct hockey team they once skated for. Hindle also stated that both Quenneville and Dineen were gregarious to everyone who approached them. And though their time to spend on a game-day was understandably limited to around 5-10 minutes, they signed pictures and memorabilia while joking and mingling with those in attendance.

Hindle recalled that they seemed to recognize some of the fans from their playing days in Hartford. There was a familiarity there, and their enthusiasm for the meeting was  genuine.

“Most of the bus was rooting for the Blackhawks, but in their hearts they were still rooting for their Whalers” Hindle said.

Quenneville and Dineen’s tenure in Hartford covered my adolescence, and the memories of what they accomplished on the ice in Hartford haven’t faded much at all.

Quenneville, a stay-at-home, shot-blocking defenseman, came to Hartford from the Colorado Rockies/New Jersey Devils franchise. He played parts of 14 seasons in the NHL and scored 61 goals over that time. One of them was a shot he flung in while lying flat on his stomach that, I believe, actually made it onto David Letterman’s show. Another was a partial breakaway tip-in goal with 20 seconds left in the 1987 home opener to beat the Calgary Flames. Quenneville was probably the last player on the Hartford roster from which you might expect such an amazing tally.

During overtime of Game 4 of the 1986 Adams Division Finals in Hartford against the Montreal Canadiens, Dineen took the puck at center ice, did an about-face, skated into the Habs’ zone and blew right past Hall-of-Fame defenseman Larry Robinson just before beating Montreal’s rookie goaltender, another future Hall-of-Famer, Patrick Roy. He also scored the only goal in Game 6, a 1-0 shut-out to send that series to a decisive Game 7.

In 1987, Dineen represented the Whalers and scored a goal when the NHL played the Soviet Union in, if my high school French is remembered correctly, Rendez-Vous Quatre-Vignts Sept in his birthplace of Quebec City. In 1989 in Hartford, he beat the Russians in an exhibition game, this time with an overtime goal.

Later on Brian Burke inexplicably traded Dineen to the Philadelphia Flyers, but he returned to score the last goal in Hartford Whalers history, to date, on April 13th, 1997, in a 2-1 win versus the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Many years later, on a summer day in 2010, former Whalers owner Howard Baldwin brought some of his old skating employees to Rentschler Field, home of the University of Connecticut football team, for a “Fanfest” meet and greet with the former NHL team’s supporters.

In response, 5,000 people showed up to this hockey event in the middle of August. They came to speak with and get various items signed by such players as Dave Babych, Paul Lawless and Grant Jennings, but Dineen was obviously the main attraction. And to ensure everyone who came to see him got an autograph he eventually stood off the side and, without complaint, furiously signing anything and everything people handed to him.

As he has always been to Hartford, Dineen was pure class.

While it’s very fair to say that Ron Francis more than deserved his nickname “Ronnie Franchise”, Dineen was unquestionably the heart and soul of the Whalers. And he’ll always be remembered here as such.

From Dave Tippett to Ray Ferraro to Doug Jarvis to Sean Burke to Mike Liut to Francis and many more, the number of 1980’s Hartford Whalers teammates still coaching, broadcasting, GM-ing or agent-ing in the NHL is staggering. So much so that hockey fans in Hartford can only hope that, if their NHL dream ever becomes a reality, a multitude of familiar faces would return to help accomplish the goal as coaches or front office personnel that they just missed achieving on the ice; bringing Lord Stanley’s Cup to Hartford, Connecticut.

Until that time, this central Connecticut community will happily root them all on wherever they may be. Indeed, the event’s organizers are considering more of these successful hockey bus trips.

And right now the Chicago Blackhawks have got two of our best behind their bench. Hartford wishes them nothing but continued success.