"Just play your hardest and enjoy it," the captain said prior to the Blackhawks' 4-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild at United Center on Monday.
The 34-year-old forward, who is in the final season of the eight-year contract he signed with the Blackhawks on July 8, 2014, said he's still not sure what happens regarding his hockey career past this season.
"I feel like I've answered that one quite a few times here and like I said, I don't really have an answer right now," he said. "I'm just trying to enjoy the last few days of the season here with this group and not thinking that far ahead."
Selected No. 3 by the Blackhawks in the 2006 NHL Draft, Toews has 882 points (371 goals, 511 assists) in 1,065 regular-season games with them. He also has 119 points (45 goals, 74 assists) in 137 Stanley Cup Playoff games with the Blackhawks, with whom he won the Stanley Cup in 2010, 2013 and 2015. In 2017 he was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players of all-time.
He has 30 points (14 goals, 16 assists) in 51 games this season.
He announced Feb. 21 that he was stepping away from the Blackhawks to deal with the effects of long COVID-19 and Chronic Immune Response Syndrome, which kept him out the entire 2020-21 season.
Toews practiced with the Blackhawks on March 28 for the first time in two months. He returned to the lineup for a 6-3 loss to the New Jersey Devils on April 1, his first game since Jan. 28.
The Blackhawks have missed the playoffs in five of the past six seasons. They are in the midst of a rebuild during which they've aggressively remade their roster.
The biggest move came when they traded forward Patrick Kane to the New York Rangers in a three-team trade that also included the Arizona Coyotes on Feb. 28. Toews and Kane had been teammates since each entered the NHL with the Blackhawks in 2007-08 and they played their 1,000th NHL game together in a 7-1 loss to the Rangers on Dec. 18.
The Blackhawks have two regular-season games remaining: at the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday and their home finale against the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday.
On Saturday, Toews told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was looking at the final two home games "as if these are my last games in Chicago."
But with his contract expiring and the Blackhawks rebuilding, he has decisions to make. He said the reality of this season being over, and the uncertainty of the summer, hasn't hit him yet.
"I feel like it's one of those things that doesn't fully sink in until after it's over and you reminisce to the big moments when you win the Stanley Cup and you know everything happened around you is going to be a memory before you know it, so you're trying to soak it in. So in a sense it's like that, but obviously it's different," Toews said.
"But just trying to be present and enjoy everything even though it's been tough. I mean, you look at these last few months, even when I wasn't in the lineup the guys were on the road so much. This last road trip wasn't an easy one. Now we've got a tough week ahead of us with three games in four nights and so through all that, you've got to do what you got to do, but just trying to enjoy it for what it is."
