Everything Else

Bringing It All Back Home

By 1788

We’ve had some fun here the past couple months, leaving the Hawks in the background for the most part while they study and fidget about what to do to reclaim what they once felt was theirs. Obviously there’s not much you can do once your punted from the playoffs except have a press conference where you express just how angry you are and promise changes. Then you go back into the offices and realize you’re pretty much boned but thank your lucky stars you didn’t say that in public.

So we don’t have much to work with yet, and the answers probably don’t start really arriving until next week when the expansion draft, which for some inane reason is woven into the NHL Awards, takes place. But that won’t stop us from guessing!

Everything Else

Meaning

By 2118

Such a weird league. We have spent most of the past two years, if not longer, complaining that the salary cap has essentially made the differences between teams smaller and smaller, to the point where they’re hardly noticeable at times. How the shootout and stupid overtime system and the even dumber points system makes the standings somewhat fake a lot of years, and keeps teams bunched together while also making it nearly impossible for anyone to pass anyone.

And yet we sit here, with three teams having won eight of the past nine championships. And the one outlier in that group, the Bruins, played for another and lost to one of the three. So four teams have taken up 11 of the possible 18 Final slots. Stretch it back a round, and those four teams have taken 16 of 36 conference final spots, with the Kings, Hawks, and Penguins each losing one or two in that frame.

Everything Else

So… I Wrote A Book?

By 1824

A lot of you have been asking what I’ve been up to, why the program wasn’t around this season. Here’s your answer.

I won’t shroud it in any way, this is my Fever Pitch. No, not the terrible Jimmy Fallon movie (which is redundant). Or even the barely passable one with Colin Firth. No, this is off the Nick Hornby book, which was about his life as an Arsenal supporter. This is mine about being a Hawks fan, and one that somehow got involved with it professionally (somewhat).

But I don’t feel like this is just my story. I feel like it is the story of a lot of Hawks fans, or hockey fans, or sports fans in general. How we come to it, how it helps build an identity in our childhood, and how it fits and doesn’t fit as our lives change and we grow (or don’t). It’s family, it’s friends, it’s relationships, it’s trying to find adulthood when you just want to be a kid and finding your childhood when you absolutely need it most.

So yeah, it’s all of that. It’s funny, sad, glorious, confusing, and everything else. From my first entrance into Chicago Stadium, to becoming the writer of a gameday program that I was bleeding on with toner in my scalp. through three Cups and everything that came with them to now.

Hope you like it.

Couple notes: The paperback version will be ready in the next couple days, and I’ll let you know when that is. For now, just Kindle:

Buy Sam’s Book on Amazon

Everything Else

Diamonds… And Dust

By 1841

Well, the Hawks news creature briefly woke up from its springtime slumber to give us this little nugget today. Apparently the Hawks are trying to goad/threaten/beg, I’m really not sure which, the Vegas Golden Gods (I never said I was a golden god) into taking Trevor van Riemdsdyk off their hands. And they’ll do it by getting them to take Marcus Kruger along with him. Somehow, if the Knights don’t promise to take Kruger in a trade, the Hawks will then trade TVR to someone else who will… protect him? The nuts and bolts of this are a little fuzzy.

This is the NHL, and you can always find a dumbass GM who thinks your player is a hell of a lot better than he actually is, especially when you’re not that far removed from championship glow as the Hawks still just barely are. But this one is hard to figure.

Everything Else

Something Something About Taking The Heat Something Something About Firing Kitchen

By 1336

We have our first shot fired in what will apparently be Hawks-acalypse ’17. Today Mike Kitchen was fired as assistant coach, and it’s kind of amazing he was still around to be fired. But we’ll get to that. There are a lot of angles that would be a ton of fun to speculate on from this and could turn out to be utter horseshit. But we’re going to do it anyway because…FUN!

First off, I’m dying to know whose decision this actually was. There’s almost no way it was Quenneville’s, because Kitchen has been an extension of Q his entire career. It’s hard to believe that Kitchen could have been doing anything that drastically different this year than he ever has, and even Q would have to recognize the historic and epic failure of the penalty kill in the season’s first month was A. a perfect storm of events and B. really had no bearing on their playoff ouster.

So did Stan Bowman fire Kitchen himself? Or did he make Q do it? How much of a fight did that cause? Oh god just hook it to my veins!

Everything Else

Endless Summer

By 1928

It will be the longest summer for the Hawks since 2008. Even when they bit it in the first round in ’11, ’12, and last year, they at least made it to the last week of April. They barely cleared Tax Day this time.

So there’s going to be plenty of time for the Hawks to diagnose their issues and then prescribe what they want to do about it. Fifth Feather was correct last night, in that you can’t make rash decisions on a small set of games. Let’s go back to 2012. You actually forget how good that team was in the regular season, the second half without Toews. They finished with 101 points, and after that nine-game losing streak that nearly killed us all, they actually went 16-5-4 with Patrick Kane as the #1 center.

But they got goalie’d by Mike Smith, Toews wasn’t in any condition to be playing, and Crawford threw up all over himself. You’ll recall after that series there were plenty of calls for heads to roll, trade Kane for Ryan Miller, and how the 2010 Cup was a total fluke. You’ll also recall that this is when the rumors of Q and Stan Bowman not working well together and Q batting his eyes to Marc Bergevin in Montreal started to swirl. This supposedly caused McDonough to sort it all out, which led to Mike Haviland being turfed as an assistant and the hiring of Jamie Kompon, whatever that did for you.

Everything Else

You Don’t Have The Balls To Keep Me Down: Hawks at Predators Game 4 Preview/Emissions Test

By 1514

 vs. 

Predators lead 3-0

PUCK DROP: 7pm Central

TV: CSN, NBCSN, Sportsnet up Nort’

THOSE IN THE BLACK MASK: On The Forecheck

PROJECTED LINEUPS

 

All right, if I’m going to carry this wrestling analogy out to its natural conclusion, let’s do that. Those were Undertaker’s final words to Roman Reigns before he was hit with one last spear to end his career. But then, I’ve called the Hawks Roman Reigns because everyone hates them and they usually find a way to hang around longer than anyone wants. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about this is extremely confusing, and you probably think I’m a total loser. And you’d be right! Just fucking go with it, ok?

Everything Else

I Was Sure That I’d Win, The World Fought Back And Punished Me For My Sins

By 1578

It’s a touch early to start the post-mortems. They haven’t quite administered the lethal injection just yet. But clearly, the Hawks have been wheeled into the room and the restraints have been fastened. So to get to this point, clearly we got it way, way wrong. I’ll wear it. Just as I did when I pronounced the Hawks dead in March of 2015 and then watched them march to their third Cup.

As we try and clear the cobwebs, let’s take you on our journey to see what we missed so horribly.

Everything Else

The Night Dixie Drove Us Down: Hawks 2 – Predators 3 (Preds lead 3-0)

By 1424

Box Score

Natural Stat Trick

When I look back on it, I guess my predictions on this series, and the ones I assumed would follow, were based on hope more than I realized. I hoped Duncan Keith was merely pacing himself for what mattered. I hoped that Toews’s midseason scoring binged signaled he had not been infected by the Kopitar gremlins. I hoped that Quenneville would realize what he had in Oduya and TVR, and more importantly what he didn’t have, and would adjust accordingly. And I hoped that the weight of all Corey Crawford had to carry at least in the first half of the season wouldn’t be too much to leave him incapable of more miracles now. Of all those, he got the closest.

While there will be a lot of ink spilled tomorrow about “grit,” “want to,” “determination,” and whatever other bullshit we’ve built our career in dispelling, the answer is more simple than that. It’s speed. The Preds can trap, or they can forecheck, they can collapse, but whatever they do they can do it so much faster than the Hawks. When the Hawks simply mishandle a pass, or take an extra beat to get it under control, there’s a Pred there. When they do manage to get it deep, the mobile Preds defense is there. When the Hawks think they have a passing lane, it’s filled faster than they can compute.

Everything Else

Beard Of The Day – April 17th: Roman Reigns

By 3736

Everyone hates Roman Reigns. It’s felt he hasn’t earned his place at the top of the WWE roster. Yet no matter how much he’s booed or hated, he keeps ending up victorious. No matter the odds, no matter how down and out he seems, Roman OVERCOMES and wins and ends up in a big spot. He’s main-evented three Wrestlemanias in a row, for fuck’s sake. The powers that be keep pushing him, even while seemingly putting every obstacle in his way.

Everyone hates the Hawks. The NHL wants you to love them, but pretty much everyone outside the 606 hates them. And yet normally, no matter the odds or when they seem down and out, they OVERCOME. And end up where the lights are brightest, ready to be booed and heckled even more mercilessly than the last time.

The Hawks need to OVERCOME, starting tonight.