There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Hawks’ possession troubles this season, specifically as it relates to the deployment of their defensemen. But maybe, just maybe, there might be a path by which they can solve this thing once the playoffs roll around, and it will once again have to be on the back of their instantaneous Hall of Fame defenseman.
The past couple weeks, I’ve seen more noise about the Hawks “faceoff struggles” than I have in a long while. It’s almost like people seem to feel that the Hawks were a dominant faceoff team for the entire Quenneville Era, which they most certainly have not been. And it’s almost like we didn’t figure out that faceoffs don’t really correlate to wins and losses and good and bad team, which we kind of have. Let’s delve deeper, hmmm?
Here are your top five best faceoff teams: Arizona, Carolina, Minnesota, Anaheim, and St. Louis. That’s two surefire playoff teams, two teams completely out of it, and one on the very borderline. Yes, you’ll find only non-playoff teams in the bottom five, but you’ll also find Nashville and Chicago in the bottom 10. That hasn’t stopped the Predators from being one of the best even-strength teams in the league.
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PUCK DROP: 7:30 Central
TV/RADIO: NBCSN, WGN Radio
GOIN’ CRAZY OUT BY DA LAKE DERE: Hockey Wilderness
The Hawks get to round out their tour of Central Division jobbers tonight with a home date against the Green and Red from the Twin Cities. Even though the Wild are going to have scrape and claw to just get the last playoff spot over the Avalanche, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been a total headache for the Hawks this season. It’s something you’d think the Hawks want to set straight, but at this time of year we’re never certain where the Hawks focus is.
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Game Time: 7:00PM
TV/Radio: NBCSN, TVA-S, SportsNet 1, WGN-AM 720
Stare Into The Lion’s Eyes: Broad St. Hockey
As the above headline will indicate, Flyers Twitter is a weird and amusing place to dwell in for even a short amount of time. Perhaps it’s their championship drought despite having numerous good to great teams over the last 40 years that’s driven them batty, or their often times confounding management. Or maybe it’s the fact that by and large those fans live in a dyspeptic cracker hellscape of a state with two of the most abhorrent accents in any English dialect; a place that until recently had a legitimate thoroughfare officially labeled on maps as “The Road To Nowhere”. And of course, Travis fucking Hughes still hasn’t paid us our cheesesteaks going on six years later.
And those denizens have had plenty to be excited about lately as the Flyers have unexpectedly surged into the playoff conversation in the Eastern Conference.
When you play two first place teams in a row, and you lose by a combined score of 10-2, that’s not exactly encouraging. If you chalk it up to the normal nonchalance of the Hawks at this time of year, that’s pretty extreme nonchalance even from them. While this one looks bad, I’m not sure it’s quite as bad as the scoreline would indicate. Although, when they don’t get a power play goal, this has kind of been what it has looked like.
But to the point, in the first two periods when the game was still either tied, within one, or within two, the Hawks got some prime looks from down low. They hit the post twice, they missed the net twice, and had one or two others saved or deflected that on another night would have turned the game in a vastly different direction. Falling behind the Kings is never a good idea because they can just sit around their net and dare you to get shots through from the point, which is what they did basically after Lecavalier scored. But early in the game, the Hawks could have put themselves right there.
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Game Time: 7:30PM Central
TV/Radio: CSN, NHLN (US), SportsNet, WGN-AM 720
Ernest Givins’ Electric Glide: Defending Big D
From one BIGGEST GAME OF THE YEAR to the next, the Hawks now travel to Dallas to face the Stars, with whom they are currently tied for the top seed in both the division and conference, but hold the tiebreaker in regulation wins.
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PUCK DROP: 4pm Central
TV/RADIO: CSN, NHL Network, WGN Radio 720
PIZZA!PIZZA!: Winging It In Motown
A rare Sunday late-afternoon start will see the Hawks and Wings wrap up their now miniature season-series, because their fans were tired of having to stay up past 11pm or something. It’s not what it was, but the limited engagements does make them feel special in a different way. Beauty is not in permanence, it would seem.
Box Score
Event Summary
War on Ice
In what is in all likelihood their penultimate visit to Joe Louis Arena, the Hawks were able to take care of business with a revamped and still evolving forward group against a team that plays right into their strengths.
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Game Time: 7:00PM Central
TV/Radio: CSN, NBCSN, SportsNet East, WGN-AM 720
Napalm The University of Tennesee Athletic Department: On The Forecheck
Tonight’s game will conclude the season series between the Hawks and Preds. And while the Hawks have already won the season series outright(3-1-0), the Predators have exposed some of the flaws in the composition of the Hawks’ roster in the process. And they’ll catch the Preds during their most productive streak of the season, having taken points in 7 straight games, and winning four straight games on the road, and eight of their last nine.
So I could go on about the Hawks problems on the blue line, with all of the bottom four taking turns technicolor yawning to let a goal in. Or the Hawks lack of a bottom six. But we’ve all been over that. So we’ll just go anti-DLR here. This is pretty much the sound of Seabrook trying to move in musical form anyway.
