PITTSBURGH — Jarred Tinordi has found his niche on the Blackhawks after a decade of bouncing around North America.
The Hawks signed Tinordi on Tuesday to a one-year contract extension with a $1.25 million salary-cap hit, per a source, rewarding the defenseman for a workmanlike season in which he battled through numerous ailments to establish himself.
“I’m part of something they’re building here,” Tinordi said. “As a player, that’s all you really want: to have a role on a team and be respected for what you do, on and off the ice. I felt that this year. It just makes me play harder for the team.”
The 31-year-old hockey veteran joined the Hawks as an opening-week waiver claim from the Rangers. At that point, he had logged 109 NHL games over parts of eight seasons with five teams, plus another 429 AHL games over parts of nine seasons with six teams. He was the definition of a journeyman.
By March, though, Tinordi was wearing an “A,” filling in for Connor Murphy as an alternate captain — exemplifying how quickly he had become a trusted leader in the Hawks’ locker room.
He has appeared in 44 games (setting, by far, his NHL single-season career high) while recording two goals, six assists, 139 hits and 68 blocked shots.
“I really wanted to dial in my consistency, and that’s something — for the most part this season — [at which] I’ve been really good,” he said. “You don’t want your bad games to be ‘D’ games. You want to keep your bad games at a ‘B’ and your good games at an ‘A’. [I’ve been] just working through that.”
Tinordi has also officially been credited with four fights, but including all the scrums, skirmishes, exchanges of words and so forth in which he has stood up for teammates this season, that number feels extremely low.
At 6-6 and 229 pounds with a reconstructed jaw and scruffy beard, he looks the part as the Hawks’ de facto lead enforcer. Coach Luke Richardson put it best: “If you owned a bar, you would hire him as your bouncer.”
And if not for an unfortunate series of injuries, Tinordi would likely be nearing 80 appearances this season. Richardson has thoroughly relied upon him, when healthy, as a top-four staple.
Nonetheless, he missed five games (from Nov. 27 to Dec. 6) with a hip injury, 20 games (from Dec. 18 to Feb. 11) with a broken jaw, six games (from Feb. 14-25) with a knee sprain and has sat out six of the Hawks’ last eight games — including Tuesday against the Penguins — after re-aggravating his hip March 26.
Any other player probably would’ve missed even more time due to all of that, but Tinordi has tolerated plenty of pain.
“I definitely haven’t gone through something like this — this many injuries — in a year in my career,” he said. “Which is unfortunate, because I was playing well. That was in my head a little bit: I wanted to give a little extra to show what I could do and help the guys win. But at a certain point, something happens and you can’t do that anymore.”
Tinordi and Hawks doctors haven’t decided yet if he will need surgery to clean up his hip this summer, but he’s confident he will — one way or another — be able to get back to full health by next season.
And now, he can enter the summer without any stress about where he’ll be come next season.
These contract talks actually began back before the March 3 trade deadline, but he was relieved to discover that mutual interest remained even “once things settled down.” Chicago, after all, already feels like home.
“I couldn’t be more excited to be back for another year to help this team grow,” he said.
