Adam Hess – Page 7 – Faxes from Uncle Dale

This was a bizarre game and I am still not sure I fully understand what happened. Let’s attempt to parse through it together, shall we? The Bullets:

– The first period started out making this one feel like it was set to be a big time ass whipping by the Sabres. They ended up closing the period with an almost 60% CF and just watching it go down was painful. The Sabres aren’t great, but are definitely better than the Hawks, and it seemed like they were ready to flex on them. Then Gustav Forsling made a great play – broke clocks are bound to be right at least once a day – to feed Drake Caggiula in front of the net all alone, and the Hawks had a 1-0 lead. And from there, it just felt a bit like the Sabres started chasing a game they were controlling. It wasn’t really the result of anything the Hawks did, which is what made it feel so weird.

– Let’s stay on Forsling for a second. I wrote a few weeks ago that as much as I wanted to hold out hope on him, it wasn’t possible anymore. But the play he made to set up Caggiula was another sign that there is maybe a good hockey player in there that is just being suppressed. It’s like Get Out – the good hockey player is in the Sunken Place. The problem is, flashes like that are only worth so much. Later in the game he blew a defensive assignment that resulted in a flurry of chances for the Sabres. Part of that is out of his control – Sam pointed on Twitter how in this system that CCYP is running, any blown assignment is a disaster regardless of who’s there to try and help. But blowing the assignment was terrible. He’s still young, so maybe he can take a giant leap forward next year, but this is probably what he is.

– Cam Ward was good tonight. It was another strange thing to behold. He made a ton of saves he shouldn’t have and none of the three Sabres goals were on him. Hopefully he waives that NTC and they can get someone to take him.

– Patrick Kane is still really good. Brandon Saad is still good. They were both excellent tonight. I wish they were playing well for a good team. Hopefully there will be a blue line solution and a Jack Hughes here next year and they can do this again for a good team.

Everything Else

Is This The Realia Life

By Adam Hess January 31, 2019 1836 0

One of the last remaining aspects of this Blackhawks season worth giving a damn about is the play and development of Collin Delia, who has worked himself into the conversation as the potential Corey Crawford heir. Were that prospect to come to fruition, it would be a rare bright spot in this season and carry the potential to accelerate the Hawks’ eventual return to relevance, even if they end up missing out on Jack Hughes, Kaapo Kakko, and/or Erik Karlsson in June.

It’s no secret and certainly not difficult to see that the NHL has become a goalie’s league, even moreso than the NFL is a quarterback league. It’ll never get proper recognition, and hockey playing 4th fiddle in the US will play a major role, but at this point NHL goalie has become the most important position in sports. Sure, quarterbacks get the praise and attention, but NFL teams can have success even with below average or even bad quarterbacks – The Ravens and Cowboys won their divisions on the strengths of their defenses this past season, and some would make the case our beloved Bears fall in here, too.

Of course in the NHL it’s possible to make the playoffs without an elite netminder, but that’s just cuz more than half the league makes the playoffs. No one goes anywhere come April without top level goaltending. Look at the top-4 from last year: Braden Holtby, Marc-Andre Fleury, Andre Vasilevski, and Connor Hellebyuck. That’s a top-3 goalie, a Cup winner, and two of the best goalie prospects from past few years who were finally coming into their own.

So that brings us back to our Irish Boy, who has only played 10 games so far and has been equal parts incredible and terrible at time. Look no further than that mid-day game two Sundays ago against the Capitals – he made at least one save he shouldn’t have, probably two or three or more you didn’t think he would, and was mostly solid throughout. But if you had just watched the goals he gave up, particularly the first two, you would’ve wondered how his ass didn’t get pulled.

His numbers tell an encouraging story – he’s got a .936 save percentage at 5v5, which is good enough for 8th among NHL goalies with 300 minutes played in the situation (Natural Stat Trick doesn’t let me do games played). He’s also got a crazy .927 shorthanded, which is really something behind that PK unit. That’s second-best in the damn league. Add in that he’s managed not to royally screw up when the Hawks are on the PP and you have his .923 overall, which is good. Even along with that, he’s got a GAA of 3.00 because the Hawks blue line is a mess.

Obviously all of that comes with a rather large grain of salt given that he’s played just 10 games. There’s a lot more to be shown here, but the early returns are clearly encouraging. The question is if it is going to end up meaning anything.

I wrote last week about how I still think the Hawks should go about tanking in whatever fashion they can (though it won’t look exactly like a tank given what they have to sell off), and touched on how Delia represents a really hard Catch-22 situation. He’s unlikely to be able to keep playing at the pace he’s been at so far this year without some good fortune, but assuming he does so there’s a good chance he could ruin your shot at Hughes. If he does that and ultimately proves that’s who is, it’s fine. If he does that and next year comes crashing back to earth, you’re still in a precarious spot.

Meanwhile, if he crashed back to earth and you get Hughes, that’s fine, but would it result in the Hawks abandoning hope on him being the franchise goalie? I’m inclined to believe they’d have more perspective, but I definitely don’t put it beyond a desperate Stan Bowman to make a rash decision like that given that his ass could be on the line next year. So if he really does have that top level ceiling and they give up on him, even if you have Hughes you are still in a precarious spot.

That being said, Delia does have a 3.00 GAA even with all those impressive save rates, and that’s because this team is ass. So, it’s possible he could still play well and this team could still be in pits of the standings come late March, and we have the best of both worlds.

In the end, the answer to the whether or not Collin Delia is the real thing is not going to be found this season. But he’s off to a good start and how the year winds down for him will be telling, and provide something for us to keep an eye on heading into next season. We just need the Hawks to not screw this up. What could go wrong?

Everything Else

That Dirty Little Word

By Adam Hess January 25, 2019 2396 0

Here in the middle of the NHL All-Star Break, I find myself in a familiar place as last year – we’re 51 games into the Blackhawks’ season, and I’m about to talk about how they should probably tank. No, really, click this link and I literally wrote about the tank last year at the same 51 game mark. Funny how these things have a way of, erm, working out. At least I get another chance to use that ridiculous photoshop I made last year.

When I did this last year, I was basically contemplating an impossible. The Blackhawks were probably a bit too far out of the running for last place to make a true run at it, and even then they ended the season with the 7th-best lottery odds and actually ended up getting jumped and ended up picking 8th. They did address the main need area of the blue line with their pick of Adam Boqvist, and his ceiling appears to be rather high.

This year, the potential for “tanking” is much higher, because the Hawks are a measly two points ahead of the last place tie between the Ottawa Senators and New Jersey Devils. The problem is there are five other teams who can make that claim as well, and three others that are only six points ahead of the Sens/Devils. That being said, our local idiots have played at least one more game than every other team below them in the standings, and three more than the Devils (who boatraced them last week, lest we forget), so the case for them being the worst team in the league and the front runner for the last place sweepstakes is not a hard one to make, though Detroit has a case as well considering they’re tied with the Hawks through 51 games played themselves.

The situation is eerily similar to last year as well. If I wrote the following today, it would still apply , but I assure you that this cut and paste from the article referenced above:

The Crawford situation has become a lose-lose for the Blackhawks. Crow’s health is obviously the most important thing, and you don’t want to rush him back and risk anything going wrong in the future because he is going to be the key to this team contending in the years to come. And we’re seeing how well things are going without him – you have two dudes who never spent significant time in the NHL trying each game to not play as bad as they did last game. So you don’t want to rush Crow back, but without him you’re up shit’s creek without a paddle.

Then you also have the question of whether Crawford coming back this year at all is really even worth it, even if you don’t rush it. We’ve already seen reports that he might miss the whole season, so it may not be a stretch to say that the Hawks bringing him back at all could be a form of rushing him back. And even if he does come back and squeeze you into a playoff spot, is it really going to be worth playing those extra games just to more than likely get bounced by Nashville or God forbid WINNIPEG? Even if your draft lottery odds are the longest shot, that’s better chance at the apparently generational talent of Rasmus Dahlin than zero.

Clearly Rasmus Dahlin is not available this year, but insert Jack Hughes – or Kaapo Kakko if that’s your fancy – in for him (and maybe remove generational, cuz Hughes is good but certainly no McDavid/Eichel/Matthews) and it’s current. The Hawks are in a really nasty spot with Crawford and it’s arguably worse this year than it was last year, because now we’re in round two of a serious concussion problem. He’s been skating already so there’s a decent chance he returns, but as the podcast crew talked about this week he probably isn’t giving you anything more than half of the remaining games if he does come back, and even then he hasn’t had the kind of season that would see him carry them back into the playoff hunt.

Who has that kind of season is Collin Delia, who’s posted a .923 save percentage in his 10 games this year, doing so behind a defense so bad that even with that impressive save rate he still has a 3.oo GAA. If Delia proves to ultimately be a franchise goalie, then him de-railing any kind of last place finish race would definitely be okay by me. That being said, we probably won’t really know quite yet if he is a franchise goalie, even if he does help them go on some kind of run and keeps them well out of last place this year. So that’s a bit of a Sophie’s Choice for us in the pro-tank crowd – do we prefer the potential franchise goalie plays bad to help secure a franchise 1C, or do we prefer Delia ruin our chances at a franchise 1C even if he won’t ultimately be a franchise goalie? If you have a firm answer to that, I envy you.

Further complicating things is the simple fact that you can’t coach a team to tank – though Coach Cool Youth Pastor running this man-to-man system with a roster not nearly fast enough to do it properly is about as close to doing so you’ll find. Despite the system, Colliton can’t convince Patrick Kane or Jonathan Toews or Alex DeBrincat to stop being extremely good at hockey, and he certainly can’t tell anyone else not to try. Even if most of these players are not long for the roster if this franchise is going to return to competing, they’re still auditioning for NHL jobs either here or elsewhere and they owe it to themselves to play well. On top of that, a lot of this team is young and we still need to see what we have in them – Dylan Strome, Henri Jokiharju, and Delia are all examples of this. So we need them at their best.

So it comes down to if Stan Bowman is going to ultimately admit that everything he and McD have tried to force feed us this year about this team competing was just a bunch of bullshit. It’s kind of started already, but they’ll never come out and explicitly say “actually this roster sucks ass and we wanted it this way,” and they certainly won’t cop to signing shitty players in an effort to give Joel Quenneville enough rope to hang himself – which, based on what we’ve seem from this team since Q was fired in favor of CCYP, he didn’t even truly manage to do.

And if Bowman does decide to that he’s going to sell off what he can in order to maximize lottery odds, what does he really have to sell? Do you really think shipping Erik Gustafsson out of here is going to be the final straw that bottoms out this team? Has Chris Kunitz really brought enough to the table for this team to such when he leaves (the answer is no, they’ll actually get better with that)? If you can even convince Cam Ward to leave, and convince some team to take him, does that make the Hawks chances of winning the games he would’ve played that much higher?

So yeah – personally I think that tanking, in whatever form the Hawks might be able to do so, is the best way forward for this year’s Hawks. They have a decent crop of forwards locked up for the future, but there’s no 1C of the future here, so Jack Hughes is more than welcome. Even if you end up with Kakko, that’s an improvement for the future and he might even wind up as this year’s Patrick Laine.

The thing is, like last year, there is no clear and obvious way to go about “tanking” that really results in a tank, because outside of the unrealistic Kane trade that Rose talked about on Wednesday, you’re not shipping out much talent worth anything. So, like last year, we’re almost stuck hoping that the team ends up bad enough – and the teams below them string enough wins together – to have the Hawks end up with the highest possible lottery chances, and then we again hope and pray for the ping pong balls to favor us. It’s – still – the good ol’ hockey game.

Everything Else

Game #50 – Capitals 5, Hawks 8 – Snowman On A Snowy Weekend

By Adam Hess January 20, 2019 1894 0

Corscia

Well, that was refreshing. The Hawks finally showed up for a “big” game, if they still count as such, and played extremely well as they shitpumped the Capitals all day, save for a quick stretch in the third period where they let it get interesting. Let’s do the bullets:

– Jonathan Toews continued the Fuck You Tour today with a five point game that included a hat trick. It’s starting to feel more and more like he should just be doing this every game, even though I know it’s not that simple. But when he takes over a game, it’s something special to behold, really. His final possession numbers weren’t phenomenal with a 48.65 CF%, but that was likely brought down by the dominance Washington showed in the third period (which was largely score effects) and the fact that Toews was playing a hell of a lot in that period. Plus, the Hawks had a 4-0 advantage on goals at 5v5 with him on the ice. His numbers where it mattered most were damn good and that’s all I care about.

– To go along with that killer game from Toews was another monster performance by Patrick Kane, who matched Toews with a five point game of his own. He continued what has been one of his best seasons in the NHL and maybe the best year of his career in the process, and that brought me to a good but very sad realization – the Hawks’ blueline being shitty is wasting an all-time year from this duo. I’ll never take the glory years for granted, but given that these two are going off in this way, this really should have been another glory year. Damn.

– I’ve only watched two games of the Slater Koekkoek era and I’m already sick of it. I don’t hate the move for him at all, because dropping Jan Rutta and moving up the draft is nothing to complain about. Also, he does bring some speed that at least fits more of what Coach Cool Youth Pastor is trying to do. But even with that, the guy sucks ass. I haven’t seen him doing anything good yet and he was practically sitting on top of Collin Delia on the Capitals 5th goal. There was another breakdown in the defense along the way but it was still rough from him. Add in that he played over Henri Jokiharju, who inarguably needs to be in the lineup every game, and I’m tired of it already. Fucking sick of it. Get rid of it.

– Delia meanwhile had a game that reminded me a lot of Mitchell Trubisky, in a weird way. He made the big plays, performed well in the most important moments, but he still had some major screwups on the simple shit. The first two Washington goals were absolutely inexcusable, but then he continued to make the crazy saves that he had no business on. It was weird. But if he, like Trubisky, starts fixing that small shit, there’s definitely something there – more for Trubisky than Delia, but still (and no I am not doing well with Bears season being over.

Everything Else

Game #48: Hawks 5, Devils 8: Bow Your Head, Cuz It’s Time to Pay the Tithe

By Adam Hess January 14, 2019 1924 0

This is one of the absolute strangest games to try to recap. The Hawks played pretty bad but the numbers don’t seem to bear it out. Let’s dig in.

– So, the Hawks CF on the night was 50.53%, which bears out a pretty evenly played game. But if you click that Natural Stat Trick link above and find the game flow chart, you’ll see that it took until the Hawks were down 4-1 for them to even start making substantial progress on bringing this back to even. Folks, we call that score effects. This was a piss poor performance from the start and they got shitbrained by a team that realistically shouldn’t be that much better than them. That’s bad.

– Cam Ward is a huge reason why the game went south so quickly, but it clearly couldn’t all be hung on him. He was awful in net, but that only compounded the problems – it might not have mattered as much how bad he was playing if it weren’t for the fact that the Hawks were playing like dog shit in front of him. Still, we knew that Ward was a bad signing when it happened, it’s continued to show as a bad signing since, and tonight was one of his worst games of the year. Luckily there are only 34 games left, and he probably will play less than half of them. So we have that going for us!

– Slater Koekkoek is awful. I don’t even need to see more of him to reach that conclusion. The numbers showed it before he got here, and it just took one night of watching him before we saw it. I don’t even give a shit that he had a 60% CF at 5v5. I don’t want him around.

– Patrick Kane is so wasted on this fucking team. He’s arguably the most wasted player in the NHL, and that says something considering Connor McDavid is still stranded in freakin’ Edmonton. But it’s clear that Kane is still one of the top-5 players in the game, and as Sam wrote last week he might be having his best season ever, and yet he’s wasted on this team that is approaching the inarguable status as the worst team in the league. Eat at Arby’s.

Everything Else

Game #43 – Hawks 2, Islanders 2 (Islanders win Cheetos shape finding contest) – A Rose By Any Other Name

By Adam Hess January 3, 2019 1617 0

The Blackhawks were lucky this shitfest went to overtime. I am no Pullega so let’s just bullets it:

-The Blackhawks being beaten by a guy named Toews is kind of a hilarious cherry on top of this season, to me at least. Finally Hockey Twitter is right and a Toews was the downfall of the Hawks.

– So, Collin Delia might be an actual thing. Like I said, the Hawks were lucky they even got to overtime in this one, and it was solely on the play of Delia that they got there. He stopped 47 of 50 total shots and was locked in the whole time, save for some slight rebound control issues early on that aren’t exactly surprising given this is his fifth career NHL game. He’s been aces for them and might just end up fucking up the quasi-tank they have going on here. But given the status of Crawford, if he proves to be a franchise goalie, that’s way more important than Jack Hughes would be so it’d be fine. Moving forward there is no reason he shouldn’t be started every game that isn’t a back-to-back, and since the Hawks have just one of those in a light January before the bye week at the end of the month, he needs to be between the pipes this whole month so we really see what we have here.

– I have been very wary of giving up on Gustav Forsling, in large part because I felt like I really saw something in him that proved he could be a good defenseman in the NHL. He has the smooth skating stride, the puck control, the passing that you want to see from a mobile defenseman. The problem is he can’t for the life of him put it all together, and I don’t think they ever taught him what defense actually looks like in Sweden. He has been downright bad for a while now and I have finally come to grips with it. At this point the best case is maybe that you find a team willing to gamble on his upside.

Side note – based on the reports I’m hearing from the WJC and some of the earlier scouting reports, I might be starting to be a little worried about if Adam Boqvist is actually gonna be able to play defense, or if he’ll just be Forsling with better tools.

– The Jonathan Toews “Fuck You Tour” continued tonight, as even in a game in which the Hawks got shitpumped and skull-fucked simultaneously in the possession game with a hilariously bad “are you sure you even tried” 36.89 CF%, Toews dominated to the tune of an individual CF% of 60. Brandon Saad and Dominic Kahun were flanking him and were the only other two Hawks above 50%, with 58.64 and 54.55 respectively. That’s a dominant night from that line that basically went for naught, save for Kahun getting the opening goal of the game.

– Speaking of “Fuck You” tours, this time of a different variety, Duncan Keith was ass again tonight with a 37.14 CF%. I’m sad but also tired of it.

– I had the national NBCSN feed streaming on my computer, because for some reason NBCSN wanted to subject the nation to this monstrosity, but in the end it turned out that the real monstrosity was the broadcast. I don’t know who the announcers were for the broadcast, but they were boring as hell. One of them was a woman who’s analysis was good for the most part save for a few cheap praises of a Hawks team that played like utter garbage, but even with that they were not exciting at all. It also sounded like Nassau Coliseum was dead. And then in the intermission reports, Kathryn Tappen (who is normally very good) butchered Delia’s name to an extent that I did not think could be possible, though I can’t exactly blame her because he’s a relative unknown and she’s on the national level so she probably learned his name today. Then Roenick had the audacity in the postgame to say the Hawks played “good tight defense” and that’s why Delia was able to keep them in it, and I was done. I need to go back to the Mute Lounge.

– GO BEARS BITCH.

Everything Else

Game #35 – Sharks 7, Hawks 3 – The Bears Beat the Packers to Win the Division

By Adam Hess December 16, 2018 1977 0

Listen, I know my job is to write about the Blackhawks here, but at this point I am running out of things to tell you. They’re bad, get over it! The Bears beat the fucking Packers to win the NFC North! Mitchell Trubisky outplayed Aaron FUCKING Rodgers at Soldier Field. In real life!!!! That’s all that matters, folks! Alas, I do have some things to say about the Blackhawks tonight. Let’s dig in:

– Every time I do something like this, I feel the need to preface it, so I’m gonna preface this – you all know I love Duncan Keith. You all know that everyone here loves Duncan Keith. With that being said…. I am getting kinda tired of Duncan Keith. I legitimately feel like every time I watch the Hawks this year, I find myself thinking “damn, Keith is not playing well tonight.” Maybe it’s just me. But he was ass again tonight, and any chance the Hawks had at being a respectable team this year (which was slight anyway) went out the door tonight because of a bad play by Keith. It sucks major ass. Please be better Duncan, because I do not want this fanbase to turn on you like they have on Seabs.

– To expound upon an assertion in the above point, holy shit does this situation with Crawford suck ass. Yes, there’s the hockey side, and this team is now completely fucked without him. They might as well pack it in, and just finish 31st to give themselves the best chance at Jack Hughes or Crapo Cracko (that’s close enough) in the draft. But Crawford is more than a hockey player – believe it or not, he’s a real human being with a real brain that has now been put through a blender two years in a row. Fuck hockey, I just hope this dude can live a normal life. He’s turning 34 in two weeks, so he was on the downswing of his career. He won two Cups. He might be better served to retire at this point. I wish it wasn’t this way, because he deserves to go out on his own terms and deserves a better send off. But there’s more to this than hockey, and I just hope he’s okay.

– I like Dylan Strome. That’s all I have to say about this at this time.

– Go watch Mitchell Trubisky’s TD pass to Trey Burton (I tweeted it, so here ya go) and tell me your pants don’t get tighter/moister immediately. What a fucking stud. That’s a franchise QB moment. That was a franchise QB game. I love him. I want to protect him. I want to see him grow. BEAR DOWN.

Everything Else

Game #33 – Blackhawks 6, Penguins 3 – Broke Clock Gets One Right

By Adam Hess December 12, 2018 2112 0

Box Score

Corsica

Natural Stat Trick

Holy hell, the Blackhawks finally looked like a competent NHL hockey team tonight. I am not sure if that means that the Hawks are “back” (they’re probably not, cuz they’re still bad) or that the Penguins are just utter ass. The Hawks streak of bad play was not going to continue to be that bad, though, so it’s probably a small mix of both. Let’s do BULLETS:

– I am definitely not about to issue some kinda proclamation that the Hawks forward depth is suddenly good or unsung heroes, but I will say that tonight’s game showed how freaking important it is to get production from your depth forwards if you want to win. The Hawks got goals from Andreas Martinsen and Marcus Kruger in this one, and while Martinsen kinda lucked into his by just being a big guy and getting hit by the puck, Kruger’s ended up being the GWG. Obviously the Hawks depth is still ass, and it’s completely misguided to think that they can somehow become a productive depth group, but it still tells you that you need to get that right to be good. So that’s an area of need this offseason.

– When I was on the podcast this week, I mentioned that one of the most frustrating parts of the Colliton Hawks is that they don’t seem to know what to do in the defensive zone, and that was a theme tonight for sure. The Penguins first goal was a result of two key screw ups in d-zone positioning. Jokiharju was too deep in the zone to cover Bryan Rust in the left slot, but that wouldn’t have been a problem if the forwards were helping down low. So, with both Joker and the forwards out of position, it was a recipe for disaster, and Rust cashed in. To me that’s a coaching thing, and while this is basically a lost season at this point, Colliton has to correct that in his team to keep them competitive now and in the future.

– Crawford looked a bit better in this game than he has recently, but he’s still kinda jumpy-stabby at saves. Sam pointed out on Twitter after the game that he tends to do that kind of thing as he corrects himself, so maybe it’s that, and it never really hurt them tonight, but something to keep an eye on.

– Alex DeBrincat is so fucking good, which I know everyone knows already but we have to talk about it more often. The goal he scored tonight was absolutely beautiful work of art, and the fact that the Hawks got this guy with a 39th overall pick that they got for Andrew Shaw will be hilarious to me forever and ever. Thank you Montreal, you dumb french fuckers.

– Friendly reminder that Jonathan Toews was a Top 100 NHL player and Evgeni Malkin was not. That list was fucking meaningless but idiots on Twitter took it way too seriously and that made it hilarious.

Everything Else

Game #25 – Knights 8, Hawks 3 – Seen It All, Done It All, Felt Pain More

By Adam Hess November 27, 2018 2113 0