Jonathan Toews Has Retired After Three Stanley Cups And A Remarkable Comeback From Illness
Jonathan Toews stood at a podium on Friday at the Jonathan Toews Sportsplex in the St. Vital neighbourhood of Winnipeg, the building named after him in the city where he grew up, and did something a lot of people were not sure he would ever get to do.
He said goodbye to the NHL as a player rather than having illness take it from him.
"It's a privilege to be standing up here to say goodbye to the game of hockey and the NHL," Toews told the assembled reporters and cameras. "There's a lot of great players out there that don't get this opportunity."
Toews, 38, announced his retirement from professional hockey after 16 NHL seasons, 15 of them as captain of the Chicago Blackhawks, where he won three Stanley Cups, earned the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, and became the cornerstone of one of the most decorated dynasties of his era.
His final season, the one he had fought his way back from illness to have, was with his hometown Winnipeg Jets, 82 games, 29 points, and a first-round playoff exit. It was enough. More than enough, given where he had been.
"I have to say I'm satisfied, I'm fulfilled," he said. "I'm so thankful and grateful for the career I had."
Three Cups And A Career That Belonged To Chicago
Jonathan Toews was the third overall pick of the 2006 NHL Draft. He arrived in Chicago as a 19-year-old and was named captain at 20, the youngest captain in NHL history at the time.
The Blackhawks had missed the playoffs in 2007-08 and 2008-09 was the year everything changed, Toews and Patrick Kane arriving as the twin engines of a rebuild that produced three championship teams in six seasons.
The 2010 Stanley Cup was the first for Chicago since 1961, a 49-year drought that had become part of the franchise's identity in a way that droughts tend to when they outlast everyone who remembers the previous championship. Toews was 22 years old and the most valuable player of the playoffs, finishing with 29 points in 22 games as the Blackhawks beat the Philadelphia Flyers in six.
The Conn Smythe Trophy was his. The Cup was his. The city was his.
Two more championships followed, 2013 over Boston, 2015 over Tampa Bay. Three Cups in six years from a franchise that had waited half a century for one.
Toews was the captain for all three, the center on the ice at the moment of each victory, the person the camera found when the final horn sounded.
The Blackhawks called him the "heartbeat" of the team in their Friday tribute. That is the accurate word.
His final career numbers, 1,149 regular-season games, 383 goals, 529 assists, 912 points. He is sixth in Blackhawks history in games played.
The Illness That Nearly Ended It All
The chapter that almost rewrote the Toews story in its entirety began during the 2020-21 season when Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome kept him off the ice for the entire campaign.
He returned in 2021-22 and 2022-23 but was never fully healthy, playing 53 games in his final Blackhawks season while managing the effects of both CIRS and long COVID.
The Blackhawks did not re-sign him when he became an unrestricted free agent in July 2023. He did not retire then, he stepped away without closing the door, because he was not ready to close it.
The two years that followed involved a healing journey that included a five-week trip to India, treatment for both CIRS and long COVID and the gradual work of convincing his body to cooperate with his desire to play hockey again.
He said publicly during that period that he had met others struggling with the same conditions and recognized the importance of eventually sharing the details of his health journey.
He also made clear, when he was ready, that he intended to play again.
He signed with the Winnipeg Jets for 2025-26, his hometown team, the franchise that brought the NHL back to the city where he grew up.
He played all 82 regular-season games, the first time he had managed that since 2018-19, the third time in his NHL career.
The fact that he did it after what his body had been through is, in Toews's own framing, one of the things he is most proud of.
"I'm happy I gave it another shot, regardless of how things went this year," he said Friday.
The Career Nobody Else Was Having
When you catalog what Jonathan Toews accomplished in professional hockey, the Triple Gold Club membership is the credential that places him in the smallest room in the sport.
He joined it at 22, becoming the youngest player in history to have won the Olympic gold medal, the World Championship gold and the Stanley Cup.
He won two Olympic golds, Vancouver 2010, Sochi 2014, and a World Cup in 2016. He won consecutive gold medals at the World Junior Championships in 2006 and 2007.
The professional résumé and the international résumé together produce the picture of a player who won at every level of the sport he competed at.
The complicated ending, the illness, the forced absence, the uncertainty about whether he would ever play again, does not diminish the career.
It adds a dimension that purely athletic achievement does not produce. Toews's willingness to talk about CIRS and long COVID, to describe what it felt like to have his body stop cooperating and to fight his way back from that, made him a different kind of public figure than the three-time champion he already was. He was not required to share any of it. He chose to.
"Sometimes I catch myself wishing that things have gone differently and I could have finished my career on a different note these last five years or so," Toews said at the Sportsplex in Winnipeg. "But truth be I'm grateful for the struggle and the learning experiences I've been through. I feel like I've learned so much more about myself and about life."
His number, 19, will eventually be retired at the United Center in Chicago. That has not been formally announced, but it will happen.
The banner will join the ones from 2010, 2013 and 2015. It will hang there because of what he did in that city, with that team, across those 15 seasons.
He said goodbye from a building in Winnipeg that bears his name. A fair place to end.