Stop me if you heard this one before. The Blackhawks go in to St. Louis for an early season matchup against the Blues, lose a frustrating game, walk out with 0 points, it gets projected for how things will shape out in the playoffs and then no one remembers what happened a week later.
Oh that’s right. This has been an ongoing tradition since Barrett Jackman slowly slid out of a goat’s birth canal.
Whatever. On to the rest.
vs. 
FACEOFF: 7pm
TV/RADIO: WGN for both
MAKE SURE YOU’VE HAD YOUR SHOTS: St. Louis Gametime
You can’t avoid it forever. Eventually you have to go visit the outdoor prison that is St. Louis and play the hockey team comprised out of whatever they scraped out of the drains that resides there. It’s hardly enjoyable usually, and you’ll just want it to be over, but the NHL schedule-makers make you do it anyway.
This is kind of an extension of Wednesday’s Angry At Numbers, but looking more specifically at Patrick Kane. We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog analyzing Kane’s linemates and production, which seems weird. It seems weird because no one would argue that Kane isn’t one of the top 10 players in the league, so why should it matter so much who he is playing with? In one sense, you feel like it shouldn’t. But in another, it does. Kane’s such a unique talent with such a unique style, he’s not as user friendly as say Toews or Hossa is (and there’s been plenty of talk about who Hossa should play with too).
So I thought I’d go back through and look at Kane’s most productive seasons and see who they were spent with, and maybe we’ll have a better idea of what should be happening now.
Box Score
Event Summary
War On Ice
Can I share with you all my new biggest fear? It’s not about the reinstatement of prohibition or the new Avengers movie being as bad as Dark Knight Rises. It’s that we may be witnessing the birth of the Predators becoming just as obnoxious and awful as St. Lewis is now. I don’t mean that they’ll become as terrible, ignorant, ugly and racist as Cardinals fans. But I mean that with Laviolette running the program, we’ve already seen them adjust to an uptempo and aggressive style. With James Neal and Mike Ribeiro, they’ve got more than enough assholery. And to back it all up. They’ve got plenty of skill too. We’ve mentioned it before but the Preds have guys that can flat out play and some that are only just now going to be reaching their full potential. And no matter what, I think there’s always going to be enough leftover Trotz in this team that they’re not going to go flying off the handle and shoot themselves in the foot the way the Blues can. It’s almost Halloween.. this is the time to talk about what scares you, right?
at 
Game Time: 7:00PM Central
TV/Radio: CSN, WGN-AM 720
Ghost With A Boner: On The Forecheck, III Communication
Tonight is literally the most important hockey game of the season to this point league wide, with the last two teams without a regulation loss squaring off in Music City. The somewhat surprising Predators holding a slight advantage in the standings in the early going, with a shootout loss in the one more game they have played than the Hawks, and Conference III bragging rights are on the line.
Been a while since I’ve taken a hack at one of these, so let’s get to it. These should obviously come with something of a caveat, as five games isn’t much of a sample size. However, seeing as how my time machine is on the fritz and I can’t zoom into the future a couple months and then come back with numbers with a bigger sample size, this will have to do. Blame the dog. She chased her ball in there and knocked something loose. Engineering isn’t really her thing.
That’s Duncan Keith’s Corsi-percentage, which is tops in the league among defensemen, and in fact tops the every single player. Better yet, Niklas Hjalmarsson’s 64% is second in the league. Again, these numbers were piled up against some awful teams, other than Dallas. So you’d expect these numbers to be pretty high. But for comparison’s sake, Keith’s season long Corsi% last year when he won the Norris is 57%. Hammer’s number is impressive because A)he’s not really required to push the play as much as defend, B) he spent three games playing with both van Riemsdyk and Oduya and flipping from the left to the right and back again. While I still worry about Keith being now over 30 and maintaining this form, the opening signs are very positive indeed. We’ll find out more this week on the road, of course.
