CHICAGO — Former Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville has sat down for at least two interviews this year, and the first subject he tackled in each wasn’t Kyle Beach, but instead pickleball.

“Playing a lot of pickleball down in Florida, pickleball heaven right around Naples,” he told The Leafs Nation in February.

Earlier this week, Andy Strickland of “The Cam & Strick Podcast” asked Quenneville what he has been doing the last couple of years.

“I’ve been living down in Florida, been playing a lot of pickleball,” he said. “It seems like it’s a craze that’s gone over the top and I’m in the middle of it all, enjoying it every day.”

Based on the rest of the interview, he has gotten really good at dodgeball too.

That’s what he did for the rest of the nearly 45-minute “Cam and Strick” interview: duck and dodge questions and contradict himself about what he knew — and when — about Beach’s sexual harassment allegations against former Hawks video coach Bradley Aldrich.

For those who may need a refresher — perhaps Quenneville himself — Beach, a former Hawks prospect, accused the Hawks of negligence in a May 2021 lawsuit. Identifying Beach only as “John Doe,” the suit accused Aldrich of “forcibly touching” him and using threats of physical violence and harm to his hockey career in an effort to coerce Beach into having sex with him in May 2010.

That prompted the Hawks to hire law firm Jenner & Block to conduct an independent investigation. In October 2021, the firm’s report found that team executives were told about Beach’s allegations when he first came forward in 2010 and that they “violated” the team’s sexual harassment policy by not investigating the allegations “promptly.”

According to the Jenner & Block report, then-Hawks President John McDonough reported Aldrich’s alleged misconduct to human resources — three weeks after team executives met about Aldrich and and five days after the Hawks won their first Stanley Cup in 49 years.

On June 16, 2010, Aldrich was given the option to resign and “received a severance and a playoff bonus, and continued to be paid a salary for several months,” according to the Jenner & Block report. He participated in the victory parade, had his name engraved on the Stanley Cup and got to take it to his hometown of Houghton, Mich.

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