Chicago Sports

If you were lucky enough to have seen Adele play her first Chicago show at Martyrs in 2008 or got coveted tickets to the Rolling Stones’ surprise show at Double Door in 1997 or saw U2 at Park West in 1981 before they broke big, you have Jam Productions to thank.

One of the country’s longest-running and largest independent producers of live entertainment, Jam is a rarity in the music industry landscape, untethered to a large corporation, having built an empire taking risks on booking “newbie” bands that eventually became megastars.

Founded in Chicago by Jerry Mickelson and former co-partner Arny Granat in 1972, with some employees who have spent decades with the company, Jam provides much of the behind-the-scenes that’s helped make Chicago an epicenter of live music.

Now marking 50 years in business, Jam has given many local music impresarios cause to celebrate its efforts to making Chicago a world-class music city.

“For an independent promoter celebrating 50 years, that’s a big deal, especially when you consider the cultural and musical influence,” says Joe Shanahan, founder and owner of Metro, Smart Bar and GMan Tavern, who remembers working with Jam Productions during the first year after Metro opened in 1982 to book the infamous punk act The Plasmatics.

As a fellow independent owner and operator (and one of the leads behind the Chicago Independent Venue League), Shanahan says the camaraderie between the two entities is paramount.

“It’s been a long-term business relationship that stands the test of time,” he says. “I don’t think there’s a week that I don’t communicate with Nick Miller or Andy Cirzan” — talent buyers for Jam.

Shanahan says he often compared notes with Jam during the pandemic as shows were being canceled or rescheduled.

“That personal touch has been so important,” he says. “They breed community and cohesiveness.”

The people who work for Jam are known as rabid music fans who want to find tomorrow’s stars.

“No matter how big a show they are putting on, these are people that know an amazing amount of music beyond what they are booking or what might make them money,” says longtime WXRT host Lin Brehmer. “They are people I can talk music to all day long.”

The radio station got its start in 1972 with Jam’s late-night programming. Jam went on to support the yearly WXRT Holiday Jams. Brehmer says Jam even put together a soccer game at one point — with The Kinks.

Chicago rock photographer Paul Natkin — whose famous shots of Bruce Springsteen and Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads have graced countless magazines — agrees.

“They know music better than anyone on the planet and can make a decision — even if no one’s heard of a band,” Natkin says. “They book them because they know they’ll be big one day.”

He points to examples including Journey, Van Halen and Foster The People.

Natkin says Mickelsen gave him inside access in the 1970s, when he was starting out to shoot shows at Jam-booked venues including the Riviera, the Vic Theater, Park West and the former Ivanhoe Theater.

“I would not be doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for Jerry,” Natkin says. “He had some kind of weird foresight that someday these pictures would be important.”

Many of those images can be seen inside the Riv, which is undergoing a massive “refresh” to painstakingly restore original details of the 100-plus-year-old building.

“He is really understanding how the grandeur adds to the value,” Sarah Wilson, executive director of the Uptown United / Uptown Chamber of Commerce, says of Mickelson. “He’s really showing that with all the work he’s doing in the Riv right now and investing in it to give it a real taste of what it used to be.”

She’s also looking ahead to whenever Jam might finally unveil its rehab of the long-shuttered Uptown Theater, which the company owns.

Its venues also include the “new” Double Door, which was shut down in Wicker Park in 2017 and has taken up the old Wilson Theater space, aiming to open this fall.

The way the neighborhood is shaping up with all of these concert halls is “almost a repeat of Wicker Park,” Double Door owner Sean Mulroney says.

“They are an amazing company and really the last holdout of the large but smaller agencies that have done magical stuff in this town,” Mulroney says.

He remembers Jam helping book the Double Door’s first show — Lloyd Cole in 1994.

And then there was the secret show that The Rolling Stones played at the venue in 1997.

Mulroney says many of his old staff are now working to help refresh the Riviera.

“All the local folks who have had things slow down due to COVID — Jam is employing them,” he says. “Jerry has made such a big impact. Jam is one of the big dogs in a very tight community, which is music in Chicago.”

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“It’s what we do. It’s trying to pick tomorrow’s superstars today.”

That’s how Jerry Mickelson describes the mission of Jam Productions, the Chicago concert promotion agency that he and his co-founding and now former partner Arny Granat started 50 years ago.

Mickelson reflects on half a century in the business but also talks excitedly about what he calls “Jam 2.0,” a planned rebirth after the pandemic shutdowns of the past two years.

He’s looking ahead to ventures including Jam’s biggest undertaking: the renovation of the Uptown Theater, a $125 million effort also involving developers, that’s been in the works since being announced in 2018.

“There’s a lot we want to do,” Mickelson says. “We want to build upon the foundation we’ve laid. I’m always looking for new opportunities, new venues, new bands to work with. That’s why I think it’s important to restore the Uptown Theater.”

The COVID-19 pandemic sidelined that, says Mickelson, who also is restoring the Riviera Theater to its early 20th century heyday.

“I’ve got a few interested parties I’m talking to who understand the meaning of the [Uptown Theater] project because it’s not just about restoring the theater. It’s about a social-impact type of investment. It will create jobs. It will be driving economic activity in the Uptown neighborhood, which all the businesses will benefit from.”

It was always about neighborhoods. That’s what set Jam apart from the beginning, Mickelson says emphatically.

“We were always neighborhood-centric,” he says. “So whether it was Alice’s Revisited or the Ivanhoe Theater or the Park West, we’ve always been looking at neighborhoods to bring our shows to.”

They brought nearly 39,000 of them to Chicago clubs, theaters and arenas over the course of a half-century.

Back in 1971, when he was a 19-year-old college sophomore, Mickelson told his father he wanted to get into the music business. His father urged him to get a partner — and told him to look up Granat, the son of his gin rummy card-playing buddy.

“I didn’t know Arny except that he had graduated from Michigan State,” Mickelson says. “It’s not like he was doing any great, big career stuff at the time, either.”

“We met on a conference call,” Arny Granat says in a separate interview. “There was no handshake. But I guess it was a handshake on the phone. Jerry’s dad was a lawyer, and he had one of those big, old speakerphone boxes on his desk. We talked for a while, and we just decided to do it.”

Jam Productions was named not for their initials as many have surmised.

“We were sitting around smoking one night, and Jerry says ‘Let’s call it Sky Blue Productions,’ ” Granat says. “And I said, ‘That sucks! Why don’t’ we call it Jam, like a music jam, and we can change it later?’ But it stuck.”

The two shared a “unanimous vision” from the start about their company what it would become.

Their partnership would take them from working security at clubs and hanging out for “hours and hours” in countless building lobbies to get a few minutes with booking agents to running a major player in the business.

“The first thing we did was start a security company,” Mickelson says. “We were flying by the seat of our pants. There was a [promoter] named Jan Winn who had an exclusive booking agreement with the Aragon. So we worked security there for him. We listened and learned — which shows were selling and which ones weren’t.

“We learned how security handled a show and how fans would want it to be handled. We saw how shows were marketed. How the bars worked, the merchandise sales.

“Back then, there weren’t national tours being promoted. It was more regional. And so we had two major concert promoters here: Triangle Productions, based in Chicago, and Howard Stein, based in New York. We had to compete with them, and that was hard.

“So we started producing shows out of town”– as far away as Minnesota and Ohio — “because we couldn’t get any here. We had to come up with our own model of booking shows, or we were finished.”

They used what Mickelson calls the Jam “farm-team system,” modeled on that of Major League Baseball with its minor leagues.

“We started working with acts when they were babies,” he says. “You started with them out of town in triple A clubs, for example. And then they moved up to bigger double A clubs and eventually the big leagues.

“That system led us to our first Chicago show — at Alice’s Revisited on Wrightwood on March 10, 1972.”

He says they started looking to book more clubs around Chicago, slowly becoming better-known, “building relationships” with bands, venue owners, other promoters and agents.

Their first major-venue booking, though, was out of town –in 1972 at the St. Paul Auditorium in St. Paul, Minnesota. Savoy Brown was the headliner, Long John Baldry opened, and Fleetwood Mac was the special guest.

“Whether it was Supertramp or Bon Jovi or Coldplay or Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Genesis, Prince, our guts and our ears told us to go after these guys and work with them, build those long-term relationships,” Mickelson says. “And that’s what we did.”

Relative newcomers such as Madonna, Pink Floyd, U2, Springsteen all came to Chicago early on via Jam.

The company booked its first show at the Aragon in 1973, by that time having worked out a deal with the venue following Winn’s departure). It featured rocker Lee Michaels headlining.

Two years later, it booked Queen to play there.

That same year, Jam was also working the Riviera Theater, booking Supertramp to play the old movie palace.

“We were hard-headed,” Granat says. “We stuck to our guts. We worked really hard. There was nothing that came easy back then. Jerry and I lived together for 10 years to save money. We worked out of an office in the back. It was just persistence, and we never stopped.

“It’s that corny old saying: it’s easier to go in the direction that the horse is already headed. We kept going in our own direction.”

The two partners were involved in every aspect of the business, from merchandising to security to bars and other club amenities to add to the concert-going experience.

In 1979, one of their concert promotions gave a handful of lucky ticketholders a chance to skate with the Police at the Aragon’s legendary roller rink ahead of the band’s gig the following night at the Riviera Theatre. Mickelson put on skates and skated alongside the band.

They also created WXRT as an outlet for music.

“All this new music was coming out, whether it was Springsteen, Aerosmith, Prince, and there wasn’t a lot of airplay for rock until radio adjusted to the times,” Granat says. “WXRT was a Spanish station at the time, and we’d go in and play music from new artists from midnight to 6 a.m. That was the start of WXRT. We sold [commercial/promo air time] to head shops and clubs and even traded time. Eventually, we became so popular that our start time moved up to 10 p.m. And soon it was 24 hours of WXRT.”

They say they ended up selling their stake in the station for not much money, which Granat, with a hearty laugh, now calls “probably one of the worst decisions” they made.

Jam persevered, remaining independent even as many regional and local promoters faded away or were sold to national promoters including Live Nation, Clear Channel and SFX Entertainment.

And it kept adding venues. The Auditorium Theater, Park West, Poplar Creek, the old Chicago Stadium, the Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena), the World Music Theater (which Jam co-built and operated), Double Door, Metro and more.

Hundreds of concerts would come to Chicago each year “brought to you with a little help by your friends at Jam.”

Mickelson says what made him and Granat successful was their ear for the next big thing, “that you can pick out a future headliner early in their career. What we do for a living is curate music for the masses to hear live. I like to think I have a really good ear for that. And so do all our bookers. We have a really good gut instinct to want to bring those bands to our venues not just in Chicago but out of town as well.

“If we like something, typically the masses will at some point. We just happen to hear it before anybody else.”

Granat departed Jam in early 2020 to set up his own company, Grand Slam Productions.

They say things weren’t always rosy between them but mostly were.

And they say they’re proud of the legacy they built.

“We’re Chicago’s most prolific promoter because, when you look at the trail we’ve blazed, we’re pretty tough to beat,” Mickelson says. “We were the first promoters to go into neighborhoods in a really big way. We brought Supertramp to the Riv for the first show there. We did the first show at the Rosemont Horizon in 1980, with Fleetwood Mac. We did the first show at the World Music Theater, with Cher in 1990. We brought Billy Joel to the United Center in 1994. We brought music back to Comiskey Park in 1976 for the first time since the Beatles played there in 1965. We convinced the city of Chicago to OK a Radiohead show at Hutchinson Field in Grant Park. That paved the way for Lollapalooza.”

Has their friendship outlived their business breakup?

“We’re still friends, yes,” Granat says. “We still respect each other. Good, bad or indifferent — we lived together, we partied together, we bled together, we ate together, we breathed together.

“In the early days, there was no ego between us. We had the same goals. We were on the same page.

“Are we buddy-buddy? No. It was just time for us to go our separate ways. I had to [pursue] my own vision. He’s doing his own vision. I respect him for that. I hope he respects me for what I’m doing. I would say he’s still my brother.”

Says Mickelson: “Yes, we are still friends. Generally, for 46 years, it was smooth sailing. But, in the end, it was time to move on, and we had different visions for what the future looked like. But I will tell you, there were no two guys more in touch with the music business than us. It was good.”

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CHAMPAIGN — Simeon is the state’s premier high school basketball program, holders of a record nine state championships.

Metamora had never been to the state finals before Friday.

So when Tyson Swanson headed to the free-throw line with 42 seconds to play and the Redbirds clinging to a one-point lead against the Wolverines, there were likely an awful lot nervous fans from Central Illinois.

Swanson’s teammates knew those free throws were money in the bank. Swanson made 147 consecutive free throws at a practice this season. He’s at home at the line.

“I wasn’t that nervous,” Swanson said. “I have a pretty good free-throw percentage.”

Swanson drained the free throws and then Metamora defended Simeon’s final possession well. Jaylen Drane missed a contested three-pointer as time expired and the Redbirds celebrated their 50-47 upset of the Class 3A state title favorites.

Metamora will play Sacred Heart-Griffin in the title game on Saturday. It’s the first time there hasn’t been a Chicago area team in the Class 3A state title game since 2011.

Metamora’s Ethan Kizer, a 6-6 junior, made the biggest shot of the game.

Simeon led 47-39 with 5:02 to play. The Redbirds (30-6) clawed back with two baskets by Swanson and one from Zack Schroeder. Then Kizer drained a long three-pointer with 1:51 left to give Metamora a one-point lead it would never surrender.

“You just have to believe,” Schroeder said. “There was never a doubt we could come back from that deficit. We just kept punching them in the mouth and kept getting stops.”

Kizer is Metamora’s tallest player. The rest of the team is 6-3 or shorter. The Redbirds showed their grit in the post, outrebounding Simeon 18-17.

“We did a really good job of blocking out,” Metamora coach Danny Grieves said. “[Simeon] crashes the boards as good as any team we’ve seen all year long. We ran a couple of drills to get ready and then kept feeding their brains that everyone had to block out, even the guards.”

Swanson led Metamora with 15 points and sophomore Tyler Mason scored 10. Kizer finished with nine and Schroeder scored 8.

Most teams have shot poorly from three so far in the tournament, but the Redbirds were 7 of 14.

“They made nine against Rock Island so we really tried to take away the three,” Simeon coach Robert Smith said. “We did a better job of that in the second half but unfortunately the one [Kizer] hit was big.”

Drane and Jalen Griffith each scored 12 for Simeon (28-6) and junior Michael Ratliff has seven points off the bench.

“They blocked us out pretty good,” Smith said. “That doesn’t happen [6-8 brothers Miles and Wes Rubin] very much. They knew the key was to keep us outside the paint. I’ll give [Metamora] the credit for that.”

Simeon will play St. Ignatius in the third place game late Friday.

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I have a logistical question. If you need to have a wheelbarrow full of money sent overseas, is it best to do it via cargo ship or airplane?

I ask because the Ricketts family, owner of the Cubs, reportedly is interested in joining a bid to buy Chelsea FC of the English Premier League, and the price for the iconic franchise could be more than $3 billion. Cubs finance guy Crane Kenney once said, “Basically, my job is fill a wheelbarrow with money, take it to Theo’s office and dump it.” Funny thing, though: That wheelbarrow rarely visited the cubicle of former team president Theo Epstein. In fact, after the club won the World Series in 2016, the Rickettses were content with watching the money from their investments in and around Wrigley Field pile up like sand dunes.

The sad state of the team now is a direct result of that refusal to spend on players. But, wait! Team chairman Tom Ricketts can explain! There was the whole COVID-19 thing. He had predicted that the financial losses for major-league teams due to the pandemic would be “biblical.” And here we are. The underlying message was that any clear-thinking person should be able to understand why the Cubs hadn’t been out there trying to win a division, let alone a World Series. It was a tortured and shameful argument for a billionaire family to make, but Ricketts neither blinked nor blushed while attempting it. That no one bought it didn’t seem to bother him in the least.

The most important part of crying poor is the poor part. At a minimum, you need to be able to sell the perception of poverty if you’re going to start warming up your vocal cords and activating your tear ducts. When word leaked recently that the Ricketts family was interested in buying Chelsea, the extremely faint perception of a baseball franchise on hard times went out the window. Chelsea is for sale because its owner, a Russian oligarch, is facing sanctions tied to his country’s invasion of Ukraine.

I’m sure that the next time Ricketts meets with the media we’ll be tut-tutted and told we don’t understand that the mountain of money in this corner has absolutely nothing to do with the mountain of money in that corner. Two different animals. Apples and oranges. A massive accounting undertaking that none of us civilians would be able to understand.

Maybe, but we do understand that the Rickettses, who delivered a World Series title to a fan base that hadn’t experienced one in more than a century, has sat on their collective hands for the past five years and refused to budge. Couldn’t get to their wallets if they wanted to. And those wheelbarrows of cash? They didn’t get out much.

The Cubs went 71-91 last season. There was a reason for that. After the 2020 season, they traded ace Yu Darvish in a luxury tax salary dump, a disgraceful move by a team doing business in a major market. The floodgates opened at the 2021 trade deadline, with the Cubs moving crowd favorites Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Javy Baez. Fans, knowing a rebuild when they smelled one, were outraged. All the money they had been asked to shell out over the years – for tickets, concessions, parking, a new TV network, etc. – and this was the thanks they got? An unrecognizable lineup?

I hope the family does buy Chelsea. I’m dying to hear Tom Ricketts reminisce about his personal attachment to the Premier League in the same way he talks about meeting his future wife in the bleachers at Wrigley. No one should be surprised if he tells us that he worked at a Long John Silver’s franchise as a teenager, that Long John Silver was a fictional English pirate and that Chelsea is a neighborhood in London, the capital of England. It’ll be quite a connection.

Speaking of special relationships, how about the Cubs and the Red Sox? Whatever the Red Sox do, the Cubs follow suit. The Red Sox hire Epstein. The Cubs hire him away. The Red Sox renovate Fenway Park. The Cubs renovate Wrigley. Red Sox owner John Henry buys Liverpool FC. The Cubs’ owners show interest in buying Chelsea FC.

However, I don’t remember Henry ever saying he was strapped for money.

“The league itself does not make a lot of cash,” Tom Ricketts told ESPN in 2020. “I think there’s a perception that we hoard cash and that we take money out that’s all sitting in a pile we’ve collected over the years. Well, we don’t.”

I can’t imagine how anyone would have gotten that idea.

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Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer made it clear last year that he hoped manager David Ross would be with the club for a long time. On Friday, the Cubs took a step to make that happen.

Ross and the Cubs have agreed to terms on a three-year contract extension, the team announced. The deal replaces the final year of his last contract, running through 2024 with a club option for 2025.

Ross, who finished his playing career with the Cubs, stepped to the helm ahead of the 2020 season. In the pandemic-shortened season, the rookie manager guided his team to a division title and was a National League Manager of the Year finalist.

The next season, Ross navigated the Cubs’ trade deadline sell-off. The team finished with a 71-91 record, ranked No. 4 in the NL Central standings.

Ross enters the 2022 season carrying a 105-117 managerial record.

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The Bears cut running back Tarik Cohen, who was a versatile weapon in his first two seasons but had not played since suffering a torn ACL in Week 3 of the 2020 season, on Friday. The move comes with an injury designation, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter, meaning that Cohen could not pass a physical.

Cutting Cohen was somewhat anticipated after new general manager Ryan Poles refused to divulge any update on Cohen’s medical condition when he met with reporters at the NFL Scouting Combine last week.

The move will save the Bears $2.5 million in salary cap pace, per overthecap.com. Cohen had a $5.75 million cap number in 2022, but the Bears will incur a $3.5 million charge in dead money by cutting him.

The Cohen saga typified Ryan Pace’s seven-year tenure as general manager before he was fired following the 2021 season. The 5-6, 194-pound Cohen was a genuine find for Pace in the fourth-round of the 2017 draft out of North Carolina A&T — a versatile scatback/kick returner with big-play ability and an exciting style that made the diminutive Cohen an immediate fan favorite.

As a rookie in 2017 under John Fox, Cohen scored on a 46-yard run and a dazzling 61-yard punt return and had a 70-yard pass reception. He also threw a 21-yard touchdown pass to tight end Zach Miller against the Ravens to become the first NFL player since the Cardinals’ Terry Metcalf in 1975 (and the first rookie since Gale Sayers in 1965) to produce a touchdown with a rush, reception, punt return and pass. He also was the rookie winner of the Brian Piccolo Award that season.

Cohen was even more productive in Matt Nagy’s first season in 2018, when he made the Pro Bowl as a return specialist. He averaged 4.5 yards per carry (99-444) with three touchdowns, 10.2 yards per reception (71-725) with five touchdowns — including 50- and 70-yard receptions from Mitch Trubisky.

Like everything else with Nagy’s offense, it was presumed that the best was yet to come the following season. But that hope dissolved, eventually in disastrous fashion for Cohen. His production dropped significantly in 2019 — to 3.3 yards per carry (64-213, no touchdowns) and 5.8 yards per reception (79-456, three touchdowns).

He signed a three-year, $18.3 million contract extension two weeks into the 2020 season. But eight days later, Cohen suffered a torn ACL when he was hit while making a fair catch on a punt return.

Cohen never played for the Bears again. He not only missed the final 14 games of that season (including a wild-card playoff game), but also missed the entire 2022 season — never appearing even close to returning. The Bears never explained the extended recovery, refused to address or deflected any questions about a complication or additional surgery.

Cohen finished his Bears career with 264 carries for 1,101 yards (4.2 avg.) and five touchdowns rushing; and 209 receptions for 1,575 yards (7.5 avg.) and nine touchdowns receiving.

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ESPN’s Bracketology efforts are focused on projecting the NCAA tournament field just as we expect the NCAA Division I basketball committee to select the field in March. ESPN bracketologist Charlie Creme uses the same data points favored by the committee, including strength of schedule and other season-long indicators, including the NET and team-sheet data similar to what is available to the NCAA, in his projections of the field. Visit the NCAA’s website for a fuller understanding of NCAA selection criteria.

The 64-team bracket is the standard version of the NCAA tournament field that has been in place since 1994. If the 2021 field is comprised of 64 teams, there will be some key differences to past years, however.

The primary adjustment from a normal year is, of course, the playing of the entire NCAA tournament at a single site. This eliminates the need for geographical considerations in seeding. Additionally, there will be at least one fewer automatic qualifier this season, as the Ivy League’s decision to forgo the 2020-21 season reduces the number of AQ entries to 31 for this season.

In this projection, a condensed selection process would reduce the field by eight at-large teams and eight automatic qualifiers (the latter of which still receive a revenue unit). The top four seeds in each region would receive a bye into the second round, with four first-round games per region – 5 vs. 12, 6 vs. 11, 7 vs. 10 and 8 vs. 9.

In this projection, the committee selects and seeds the 16 best available teams. There are no automatic qualifiers, although all non-competing conference champions receive the designated revenue unit.

To maintain some sense of national balance, conference participation is capped at four teams. And no region shall have more than one team from the same conference.

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BOSTON — Ten days away from the NHL trade deadline, the Blackhawks’ Marc-Andre Fleury situation remains a conundrum.

The most important factor, obviously, is whether Fleury is willing to be traded — and if so, which teams he’s willing to be traded to. He does hold all the cards here, with a 10-team no-trade clause officially in his contract and a total no-trade clause unofficially promised to him.

But the 37-year-old goaltender’s exact thoughts are hard to nail down. He’s clearly more hesitant about the trade possibility than most players are, but he did say publicly on Feb. 16 he would “love a chance to win” another Stanley Cup if he does change teams.

General manager Kyle Davidson echoed that on March 2 but also seemed to lay groundwork he might later use to justify Fleury not being traded.

“If he’s here on the last day of the season, I’m fine with that, because we have a lot of young players…who are learning a heck of a lot from someone that’s one of the best people in the game,” Davidson said. “That has its own value. So if he sticks here, I’m fine with it.”

All outcomes remain viable, but planning for next season does seem to be an increasingly significant part of Fleury’s decision-making process. Preserving stability for his family, who have settled comfortably in Chicago, is clearly important.

His current contract expires in July, and retirement is a slight possibility. But if he doesn’t retire, Fleury would prefer to either re-sign with the Hawks or with the team he’s traded to this spring, per sources.

Understandably, moving from Las Vegas to Chicago last summer, from Chicago to another city this spring, and then from that city to yet another city this summer wouldn’t exactly fulfill the stability objective.

The other critical factor is which teams are interested in acquiring a No. 1 goalie, have the cap space to fit at least $3.5 million — Fleury’s cap hit if the Hawks retain the maximum 50% — and are willing to pay the price the Hawks will demand.

The goalie trade market is encouragingly trending in a positive direction for the Hawks’ interests.

The Oilers and Capitals, long considered the most logical suitors for Fleury, aren’t seeing any improvement from their shaky Mike Smith-Mikko Koskinen and Ilya Samsonov-Vitek Vanacek duos, respectively.

The Wild have dropped into the tier of contenders experiencing goalie anxiety, too, with Cam Talbot and Kaapo Kahkonen both slumping lately.

The Maple Leafs, who’d already been linked to Fleury recently via tenuous rumors trickling out of Toronto, on Wednesday ruled struggling starter Jack Campbell out for at least two weeks with a rib injury. And the Golden Knights have similar injury concerns with their own struggling starter, Robin Lehner, although a Fleury return to Vegas feels unlikely.

But would Fleury accept a trade across the border to the Oilers or Leafs, considering Canada’s tighter remaining COVID restrictions, or to the Capitals, knowing his road to a Cup there would almost certainly involve facing the Penguins? Perhaps not. TSN’s Pierre LeBrun reported Thursday he believes the Leafs and Capitals specifically are not on Fleury’s preferred teams list.

It’s easier to envision Fleury embracing a trade to the Wild, Avalanche, Bruins or Penguins themselves, but those teams seem less likely to want him than the Oilers, Capitals and Leafs.

The Hawks can’t completely ignore their own goalie situation, either, considering prospect Arvid Soderblom is the only guy they currently have signed for next season. Kevin Lankinen is a pending unrestricted free agent like Fleury, and the Hawks may be gauging the trade market for him, too.

The final significant factor is Fleury’s in-game performance, which has slipped in recent months.

Since Jan. 20, he has gone 5-9-1 with a poor .893 save percentage. His season-long save percentage now stands at .908, quietly marking the third time in the last six years it has been below .910. Among 69 regular goalies across the NHL this season, Fleury ranks an unremarkable 31st in the holistic analytic of goals saved above average.

There’s no doubt Fleury is still an excellent goalie, and his irresistible personality, unmatched competitiveness and vast experience add even more to his resume than his pure goaltending skill.

But his recent downturn might’ve eaten into his trade value slightly, and the Hawks might be less inclined to painstakingly work out a trade with all involved parties if the return isn’t as substantial as they once hoped it’d be.

More trade buzz

Dominik Kubalik is probably the most likely Hawks player to be traded before the deadline. The Hawks don’t see him as part of their future, but a change of scenery could revive him. The Ducks have been interested in Kubalik for a while, per sources. He has also been linked to the Oilers.

Calvin de Haan is probably the second-most likely Hawk to be traded. Gritty, experienced, pending-UFA defensemen like him seem desired every deadline season. The Leafs, Hurricanes and Panthers are three teams searching for defensive depth that might make sense.

Davidson appears eager to recoup whatever he can for some of the Hawks’ bottom-of-the-lineup pieces, as well. Ryan Carpenter, as a pending UFA with some appealing grittiness and penalty-killing experience, makes total sense to trade. He fits the Predators’ team identity perfectly, and the Predators have indeed inquired about him, per sources.

Henrik Borgstrom and Erik Gustafsson, both regular scratches lately, could also move if a team shows interest.

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Two suburban officers were shot at Thursday night while working with the Vehicular Hijacking Task Force in Englewood on the South Side.

The officers, from Melrose Park and Maywood, were following a dark-colored SUV which was listed as stolen in the 5700 block of South Loomis Boulevard about 8:25 p.m. when the SUV stopped and occupants inside opened fire before driving off, Chicago police said.

The officers returned fire, but it was unclear if anyone in the SUV was shot, police said.

Neither officer was shot, but both were taken to an area hospital with non-life threatening injuries, officials said.

The SUV was later found unoccupied, police said.

No one was in custody.

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BOSTON — The Bruins now have their own 17-seconds moment against the Blackhawks.

Of course, the Hawks as a franchise will happily give up David Pastrnak’s game-winning goal Thursday with 17.2 seconds left in regulation in order to keep their own 17-seconds moment in Boston — as in, the time between Bryan Bickell and Dave Bolland’s famous game-tying and game-winning goals in Game 6 of the 2013 Stanley Cup Final.

But the imbalance in the significance of those two moments didn’t make this 4-3 defeat any easier to swallow for these current Hawks.

“It’s a dagger, that’s for sure,” Brandon Hagel said.

After a faceoff win by the Hawks, the puck bounced erratically out of the corner, over Connor Murphy’s stick guarding the crease and right to Pastrnak, who roofed it over Kevin Lankinen’s glove.

The late goal negated an altogether respectable effort from the Hawks, who matched the bruising Bruins’ physicality from the opening puck drop and twice battled back from one-goal deficits with Hagel’s 19th and 20th goals of the season.

“We played a really good 60 minutes there,” Hagel said. “Our penalty kill could have been a bit better, but we stuck together as a team, came back in the third period and made it a game. It’s tough when, at the end, no one’s out of position, the puck’s bouncing everywhere… It’s our luck, I guess.”

“I liked our battle,” interim coach Derek King said. “I liked our compete [level]. … I was thinking, ‘Hey, [if] we get this to overtime, we might have this one.’ That’s a tough one.”

Lankinen, who finished with 32 saves on 36 shots, nonetheless continued to struggle. He looked disoriented in his crease early on, then continued to spit out rebounds on every shot even after he settled down positionally.

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