This week, Rose Rankin, Fifth Feather, and Yours Truly discuss the Hawks deadline, whether they were as sick of Lehner’s shit as we are, Adam Boqvist and Lucas Carlsson, and what if anything the future might hold. It goes on a bit…
You know we aren’t here to bullshit you, dear reader. This Hawks team is done this year. They’ve looked disjointed, uninspired, and boring when they needed to do the exact opposite most. But they aren’t as far off from being a contender as it seems. So, where do they even go from here, and what do we, as fans, look forward to with this team?
Firing Jeremy Colliton
The Blackhawks must fire Jeremy Colliton as soon as possible, and we should relish when it finally happens. Jeremy Colliton has no business coaching this NHL team, now or in the future. The Hawks were a top-10 team in terms of goals just last year, and this galaxy-brained wiener has devolved it into an on-ice fatberg.
Following the Arizona game that the Hawks won in the shootout after the break, they were two points out of the last playoff spot. They had a pretty soft schedule ahead of them. If they could keep the coals hot until they hit their last big hell trip at the end of February, the ineptitude of the Western Conference might have pushed them into a playoff spot they really didn’t deserve.
Instead, we got a slate of losses to teams like Edmonton without McDavid and the Rangers, who are in complete, unabashed rebuild mode. We got an entire power play unit filled with left-handed shots and Patrick Kane on his off side just cuz. And at the tip of it all is Carbuncle Colliton, whose only moves are to triple shift Patrick Kane and then blame the effort when his team loses important games. He’s the model coach for a front office born on third. When in doubt, blame everyone but yourself.
The guys on the ice don’t buy his system because it blows and is a gigantic embarrassment to all within it. All of Colliton’s smarminess about how the lines don’t matter and they need more effort hasn’t and won’t change that. A coach who gets all of his players off of their games, as Colliton has clearly done, isn’t a coach at all.
Jeremy Colliton sucks at this. Yes, thank you for scratching Brent Seabrook, but you can go now. Firing him won’t fix everything, but it’s the first and most necessary step toward making this team fun again.
(And yes, you can lump Stan Bowman in here too. I won’t expound too much on my feelings about him here simply because it’s rare for GMs to get fired mid-season, and you can always revisit this.)
Trading everything that isn’t tied down
Trade Gus, like they should have last year. Trade Lehner for whatever you can get, because his diaper is full and his efforts empty. Fuck, trade Brandon Saad if you can get a Bowen Byram, as much as it would hurt the heart. As much as we want this team to win now, this is not a win-now team. If you were an overly optimistic idiot like me, you could have squinted at it right after the break and thought “well, maybe.”
But no longer. The blue line is one of the worst in the league. Until they fix that and get that sometimes-bespectacled asshole out from behind the bench, nothing else will matter. The only way they can even start doing that is by selling whatever they can before the deadline ends.
Because this team isn’t that far off. They need one faster, contributing forward to round out the top 9. Assuming Mitchell signs and isn’t a sewer, they need one solid defenseman to go with Murphy, Boqvist, Keith, de Haan, and Mitchell to be representative at least. It’ll take some doing, but it is doable (just maybe not with Bowman at the helm).
Young blood
In Adam Boqvist and Kirby Dach, the Hawks have two young, skilled players. At worst, you can see them being no less than good players. At best, they’re franchise cornerstones of the next wave of success.
Boqvist has the kind of speed that the Hawks can use to break through the neutral zone more fluidly than the unbearably predictable drop pass. He’s got a sharp wrister and excellent passing skills that will be a cornerstone of the power play. But as we’ve seen all year since he’s come up, he’s hesitant and overly deferential. How he’s played this year is entirely at odds with what he’s done before he got here. If nothing else, you have to fire Colliton to at least give Boqvist a chance.
Dach is a smart positional center with good on-ice vision, and not just for a 19-year-old. His passing choices and finish are only going to get better with more experience. Dach’s development should be at the top of the list for the Hawks, and as of now, it looks like even they realize that.
And of course, there’s Dominik Kubalik, who might end up with 35 goals in his rookie year. You and I both knew he was going to be good going in. It took Coach Carbuncle way too long to get that, because he sucks at this.
Crow’s last hurrah
This might be Crawford’s last year as Blackhawk. He doesn’t deserve to go out like this. He’s still a high-quality goaltender who’s managed to keep the Hawks in games they had no business sniffing. Chronically underappreciated, Crow will go down as a top 2 goaltender for the Hawks, topped perhaps only by Glenn Hall.
If the Hawks were smart, they’d try to bring him back for another year or two. But they aren’t. And even if they were, Crow would be completely in the right to tell them to eat shit and ply his craft elsewhere.
Crow will always be The Goalie here. Fuck Robin Lehner, you can have him and his dumbass neck tattoos and finger pointing. No one has done it better than Crawford as quietly and efficiently despite everything he’s gone through. It’s unlikely anyone will again for a long, long time. Cherish it.
Some of the young pieces—Boqvist, Dach, Kubalik—are in place. Alex DeBrincat is still here, even if he’s having a rough go this year. If they can get Strome for $5 million per over three years and put him back at fucking center, the Hawks’s center depth is really good. Kane is a freak who continues to deliver, though you can’t help but wonder whether he’s feeling like Mona Lisa Vito, playing for a team that’s pissing itself throughout his prime. Toews continues to prove everyone who thought his best days were behind him wrong. Murphy’s Murphy, Keith can still do it, and a healthy de Haan is a good depth D-man.
The framework is there, but not for this year. It’s time to sell, fire Colliton, and do everything they can to make this godawful blue line at least NHL-representative. Anything else would be a dereliction of duty.
vs. 
RECORDS: Hawks 27-26-8 Stars 35-20-6
PUCK DROP: 2pm
TV: NBCSN Chicago
LET THE CHILDREN BOOGIE: Defending Big D
Well this is an interesting one. The Hawks will play their last game looking like this. How much they will change by the time they play again in St. Louis on Tuesday night, well that’s something of a mystery.
We know Erik Gustafsson is a goner, as he wasn’t even brought on the trip. The Hawks will probably only get a 3rd or 4th rounder for him, making the refusal to move him at last year’s deadline when he would have been worth a first even more frustrating. Corey Crawford is starting, which makes you think that Robin Lehner could be on the move as well, if not Crawford himself. But someone has to play in goal. If the Hawks keep both, you’ll know they either have no vision or plan whatsoever or the balls to execute one.
Is this Brandon Saad’s last game here? Dylan Strome’s? Drake Caggiula’s? There are more options beyond Gus and Lehner, but how many will the Hawks take? You’re not wrong to bet on the low end, but anything is possible.
That’s the intrigue off the ice. On the ice the Hawks will have a new piece to look at, which is Lucas Carlsson. Carlsson has been Rockford’s best d-man, and arguably best player, for a while now, and the Hawks have no reason not to spend the rest of the season seeing what they have here. They should do that with other players as well. Carlsson is definitely the type of player the Hawks should be looking at more often, i.e. one with skill and mobility that can move the puck and himself quickly. Instead we’ve gotten the Dennis Gilberts and Matthew Highmores of the world, which is how the Hawks have ended up here. Maybe Carlsson isn’t anything, but with nothing more to play for it’s an evaluation time. In fact, this is how the Hawks ended up with Gustafsson as a regular, though they’ve clearly botched maximizing his value.
As for the rest of it, the Hawks played a spirited game at home on Friday, which was at least entertaining. Can they keep that going on the road for four games against teams who have real stakes? Much harder to do, and while the Hawks will claim they’ve been better on the road this year, the last road trip that left their season in ashes makes its own testimony. And these games on either side of the deadline could see some killed spirits.
To the Stars, who have won five of their last seven and are still very much in the discussion for winning the division even though they’ve had to lose a coach and surf some injury problems this year.
How are the Stars here? THE BISHOP! and The Khudes, the lates emo band to storm Dallas. Has an emo band ever stormed Dallas? We’ll save that discussion for later. Anyway, the Stars are back to being the same boring-as-all-fuck outfit they were last year that locked up their playoff spot and saw them upset the Preds in the first round and nearly do the same to the Blues (sigh). They don’t limit attempts all that well but they collapse around their net and limit chances, and Bishop and Khudobin are rocking SV%’s over .920, leading the Stars to have the second-best ES SV% at evens.
Because they certainly don’t score much. The Stars don’t have anyone with 20 goals or averaging anywhere near a point per game. They’re 24th in goals per game, but you can get away with that when you’re third in goals-against. There is some spreading out of threats here, with Seguin, Benn, and Radulov now on three different lines, but it also tamps down their threat when not together. Benn particularly seems to be on the spiral down, and we know how he feels about going down.
It’s still a stout defense, which has been buffeted by the return of Stephen Johns after he missed a season and a half with concussion problems. He and Heiskanen have dovetailed well which makes for a hell of a second pairing behind Klingberg and Lindell.
This is the first time the Hawks and Stars have seen each other since right before Thanksgiving, when the Hawks played well enough to win twice but only gathered one point. Penetrating the middle of the Stars zone will be the order of the day for the Hawks, but that’s much easier said than done.
It’ll be a stripped down Hawks team soon. They’re only playing for the future. But hey, maybe that’s when you find something.
That was one of the better games to watch in a long while. But instead of the steely-eyed and acerbic analysis you come for, there’s just a couple things I want to talk about.
-I don’t know if that was Corey Crawford’s last start as a Hawk. If the Canes were watching, they should be absolutely salivating at bringing Crow aboard to take advantage of their contender-worthy roster instead of trusting everything to James Reimer. Unlike Robin Lehner, Crow is playoff-tested and passed.
The purely factual, analytical way to look at the Hawks right now is that they should trade both goalies. Sell everything, get as many pieces back as you can for anyone that another team will give you something for, and try and reload this up next season. But being a sports fan isn’t just about being analytical and results-based and only viewing things as a process to wins. When it gets like that, you get the fucking Houston Astros.
One the one hand, Crawford deserves the chance to go somewhere where he’ll be appreciated in a way he never was here, take a team deep into the playoffs one more time, and possibly win the Conn Smythe and break it over Pierre McGuire’s bald head for costing him the one he more than earned in 2013. That would do my heart and many others’ well.
On the other, I and many others never want to see Crawford leave. Too many Hawks fans haven’t appreciated what he’s been, and seeing as how he’s the only goalie living that’s won two Cups for the Hawks, that’s pretty fucking weird. Tonight was another vintage Crow performance, standing up to a barrage that lasted for 40 minutes at least and required 39 saves just to get the Hawks to OT. He was brilliant, as he’s been thew past six weeks or longer.
It’s obviously more than one night with Crawford. He’s been made to eat shit by the organization itself, the media, and the fans for very little reason. Not only that, but he’s had to face his hockey mortality more directly than any player on this team. When he hit his head against the post against San Jose last year, most of us didn’t just wonder if he would ever play again. We were pretty sure he wouldn’t. And a lot of us thought he shouldn’t. And while he said he never considered retiring, it must have been discussed in that household at least once.
And yet Crawford has answered the bell again by doing what he does after every challenge faced. Simply ball out. After McGuire called out his glove hand simply because it was an easy-to-reach story, he gave up three goals in two games to the Bruins to provide a parade. After struggling in the opening round of 2015, he went .931 in the last three including giving up two goals against in the Hawks last three wins of the Final. He returned from missing nearly a full season to concussion last year by balling out again. He watched the Hawks bring in someone meant to take his job this past summer (and that was the plan for the Hawks, don’t you doubt it) and has just outplayed him for the past two months. He’ll even grease Lehner’s tracks out of town.
Crow is just about the easiest Hawk to root for, and I don’t know why more people aren’t doing so. He never complained when the front office hung him out to dry, nor pointed any fingers when the defense simply turned to dust the past couple seasons. He just gets on with it. Maybe the fandom or the league in general doesn’t know what we have here, but we do.
And I’d hate to see him go. He doesn’t have the NTC that the other four vets have. But ask the four of them and I bet they’d tell you he should. Just as I’d love to see one more run with them, I want even more badly one more run for Crow here. Maybe then he’ll finally get the appreciation he’s lacked in this town and league-wide for so long.
It makes way more sense for the Hawks to cash in on Crow. But we’re not in this for sense. The heart wants what it wants.
-Anyway, quick story. I had the pleasure of sitting next to a lovely, elder gent names Harold tonight from London, Ontario. He has been an occasional billet for players for the Knights. A few years ago, his wife and him decided they wanted to see a game in all 31 arenas. Sadly, his wife passed a year or two ago. But Harold decided he would do the trip anyway for her, at the age of 81. Tonight was #28, and St. Louis, St. Paul, and Winnipeg will round it out next month. Oh, and at 81 he also has two full sleeve tattoos, so he’s basically a vision of my future.
You don’t get that kind of thing anywhere else but sports. It’s kind of why we’re here. It was nice to be reminded of that again.
I understand the feeling that the Hawks season ended last night. If there was ever going to be one last charge to stand up and be counted, it was returning home for two games before going back on the road. It was seeing a non playoff team. It was having one last chance to prove to the front office before the deadline that you weren’t in need of major surgery. But we all knew the truth. And I think the Hawks did too.
Nothing last night was new. There have been plenty of 20-shots-against 3rd periods for the Hawks, because they suck defensively. That’s a structural problem, not a spiritual one. Maybe we didn’t notice as much because the goalies have been so good, and have been able to come up with 18- and 19-save periods to save the Hawks’ ass. I don’t even know that Lehner was bad last night, his level just wasn’t what it had been before. Any kind of drop from either him or Crawford results in five goals against. It’s that simple.
But you combine the structural problems–slow defense, uneven buy-in to the system (at best), and a wonky roster–with the Hawks knowing in the back of their heads they’re toast and are days away from having the roster stripped to the point the last six weeks are going to be fucking ugly, and you get this overwhelming feeling that something “broke” or “collapsed” last night. I don’t think that’s really the case.
I’m betting the Hawks themselves knew it was over when they were soundly beaten by an Oilers team without McDavid. It was over when fortune damned them to a loss they didn’t deserve in Vancouver. They were able to accept the gift that David Rittich was happy to give them, but they knew the truth when they couldn’t get close to the Jets twice when they had to. A very flawed Jets team, by the way. That road trip is when it was over, and you could tell the Hawks kind of knew it.
That said, it’s not going to get better when your coach, AGAIN, comes out and says most of the team wasn’t ready to play. That’s Jeremy Colliton’s job, and almost every time the Hawks are in a game they have to have, that will help bring meaning to the season, Colliton is there after the game saying they weren’t ready or didn’t give enough. Who’s that on? Colliton hasn’t earned that place. He may be the coach, but he doesn’t draw that water. Yeah, the roster is not good enough. And it’s not good enough in a way that can make it look really bad, given how slow it is. But you can’t keep telling us you’re not doing your job. Because after a while, what’s clear is that they don’t get ready for you.
I don’t have much patience for Lehner calling out his teammates either. Yeah, Lehner Atlas’d this team in October and November. He’s been merely ok for two months now. Sure, he included himself in it, but he’s won exactly nothing in his career, unless four playoff games counts as something. I bet it counts as fuck and all to Kane, Crawford, Toews, and Keith. Everyone starting to see why no one wants to give this guy more than one year?
Behind all of this, I think what people are really upset about is knowing just how bad the rest of the season will be to watch. Even though it will actually be healthy. If the Hawks get what they can for Lehner, Gustafsson, and maybe Crawford or Saad or Strome or something creative, it’s much better for the long-term health of the team than barely missing out on the chance to get clobbered by the Blues or Avs in the first round. That doesn’t make it an easy process to get through, but surgeries rarely are.
But yeah, the Hawks will sink like a stone through March. Even the vets, who have done their best and said all the right things, are going to find it hard to find the give-a-shit meter, much less fill it. But they’ve earned that right.
But don’t assume this is about want-to or belief. This is the team that used to exude that. Last night is just another example in dozens that the Hawks just aren’t built right. The Rangers aren’t good, yet, but what they do have is a healthy amount of speed. That’s all it takes. The Hawks don’t have any. We know about the defense, but as I’ve worried the last little bit, the forwards aren’t fast enough either. Where’s the game-breaking speed? What forward can back a defense up simply because they’re out there?
Saad maybe? Kubalik? Both of those are a stretch. It’s not Top Cat. It’s not Strome. Dach’s is mobile but his gifts are his hands not feet. It’s just not there. Are they any in the system? Dylan Sikura doesn’t change this team’s fortunes, but he’s the type of player the Hawks need to be packing their bottom six with merely because they’re fast and have a modicum of skill and awareness. They keep giving you Matthew Highmore and John Quenneville. The Hawks don’t scout themselves or the league correctly. They haven’t diagnosed what the game is now. They’re still trying to win the 2014 Cup they missed out on, which is funny because they missed out on it due to the Kings trying to emulate them and get faster.
The sad part is it’s put the Hawks in an awful position. The front office that has failed to adjust the team to modern times is now in charge of this mini tear-down or rebuild. Should they be? It’s too late now (always has been, always will be…) to have anyone else do it. But what if the decision from on high is to clean house after the season? What if your new guy doesn’t like the prospects or young players you’ve brought in at the deadline? You’re spinning wheels again. You can’t do that.
But if you let Stan do this the whole way? He got you in this mess. Is he only going to drive you deeper into the muck? He says the right thing about not managing next season for his job which would lead into a bunch of panic moves. But will that happen in practice? It’s not going to be terribly fun finding out.
Maybe we’re all angry because they keep telling us this is the price for three parades and eight or nine seasons in the penthouse. But we all know it doesn’t really have to be this bad. It’s not for the Penguins. It’s not for the Caps. It has been for the Kings, but we all know that’s just as much mismanagement too. It’s a fig leaf to hide behind for an overmatched and over-rewarded front office. We know better.
It’s a dark ride from here. But there could be light at the end of it. The mystery is what gets you.
With this being the presumable last recording before the trade deadline, Sam, John, and I play armchair GM/roster-bate. It’s even more riveting broadcasting than usual. Always free, audio always after the jump.
The Dizzying Highs
Jonathan Toews – We haven’t really taken a step back to marvel (get it?) at what Toews has done this year. And maybe because if we do we’ll just get depressed that another stellar effort from the captain–and we need to remind everyone this is the second season he’s done this after being dismissed as finished–is going to go to waste. He piled up five points this week in four games, and since his slow October he’s put up 42 points in 45 games. That would be a 77-point pace over a full season, which would be the second-highest mark of his career (though in the Season In A Can he was over a point per game). Toews has led from the front, and his metrics have also slowly improved throughout the season. And somehow he remains under the radar a bit. Maybe it’s because we just take him for granted. But it’s Keith who is nominated as the one who could leave or be traded, even though he’s been clear he isn’t going anywhere. It’s Kane who takes the headlines and most of the marketing drive. And yet do we doubt if Toews asked out tomorrow there wouldn’t be a host of teams trying to acquire him, despite his contract? It’s just as much of a given that Toews will be here for life as it is for Kane. And even though we’re pretty sure Toews knows his coach and possibly GM don’t have any idea what they’re doing, he’s still trying to hold the ship together. It’s what he does. It may be one of those things where we think we appreciate what we have here, and but won’t really until it’s not here anymore.
The Terrifying Lows
Alex DeBrincat – Yeah, it seems piling on. And he did finally break his slump in Calgary. But that didn’t change the fact that he’s got two points in his last eight games. He’s got five even-strength goals. He was terrible in the first game in Winnipeg, and he wasn’t much better last night. It’s clearly getting to him, as he’s fumbling the puck every which way. What would Strome’s numbers look like if Top Cat was having a normal season? Would he still be shunted out to a wing where he doesn’t belong?
The sobering thing here is that if Top Cat were shooting merely his career norm of 14%, he’d have 24 goals. Or 10 more than he’s got now. What would those 10 goals mean to the Hawks in the standings? It’s probably three-to-four more points. That would have them right on the cusp. And the unfortunate thing for DeBrincat, as this is all mostly just bad luck, is the Hawks will use that fact as a crutch to justify inaction either this week at the deadline or over the summer. They’ll say that if only Top Cat goes back to normal, everything will be fine. And that’s far too much to put on him.
The Creamy Middles
Corey Crawford – The past six weeks have seen Crow put up a .925 while seeing about 31 shots per game. He hasn’t given up more than three in any game. Meanwhile, Robin Lehner in that time has put up a .905 seeing 33 shots per game. Since Nov. 1st, Crow’s SV% is .916. Lehner’s is .917. But please, keep telling me how it’s Lehner that simply must be re-signed for significantly more money than Crow will probably require for a shorter period of time for a team that needs a lot more than goaltending. I want to hear all about it.
A 1–4–0 road trip in the throes of a playoff hunt does not inspire confidence. And whatever confidence you had in this team should be revealed as false based on one roster decision. A win may have kept whatever telltale heart we still have for this team beating. But looking up at six points and down the barrel of a hell trip at the end of the month makes the idea of a playoff berth even less sustainable than the style of play Colliton has this team adhere to night in and night out. Let’s mop this mess up.
– The most telling move the Blackhawks made tonight was starting Nick Seeler over Adam Boqvist. Boqvist had a bad game last night. On a team whose fate and direction aren’t as nebulous as the Hawks’s, you understand that move at least a little bit. But starting Seeler over Boqvist in a must-win game (as pretty much all of these games will be going forward) is the most concrete evidence that the front office truly, unironically believes that this is a playoff-caliber roster.
This is the kind of move you make when you earnestly believe that you are just a roster tweak away from making the playoffs. Had this team fully committed to grooming the next core, they would have chalked Boqvist’s night last night up to “being fucking 19.” Instead, in a game they had to win, they slotted Seeler—who was about as good as you could have hoped—over what is supposed to be the defenseman of the future for this team.
If you had any doubt about what this team thinks it is—and you should, since they’ve claimed there is no plan, only a process—tonight should have made it clear. The front office thinks this team can eke into the playoffs. We should judge everything it does from here on out on that basis. If this were a team that realized the chance to make a real run passed them by before last night’s game, you’d have seen Boqvist out there trying to learn from his mistakes. We didn’t, so we can only assume that they believe this is a playoff roster.
It’s not, and when they don’t make the playoffs, everyone should be fired for that failure.
– But hey, the Blackhawks still have the high-end talent that lays the foundation of a playoff team. And it all starts and ends with Patrick Kane, who kept the Hawks in it with two outstanding plays.
On Carpenter’s goal, you got a look at why Patrick Kane will go down in history as the best player to ever lace them up for the Blackhawks. He charged up the near boards, shook Pionk out of his skates around the dot, then fired a bad-angle pass from the goal line that crawled up Carpenter’s stick and in. You’re not going to see plays like that for years from the Hawks after Kane retires.
– On the Hawks’s second goal, you saw Kane do Kane things and Toews do Toews things, dropping a perfect pass through two defenders in the slot. But the thing that ought to impress most was Dominik Kubalik’s patience on the play.
Kubalik draws Kulikov to him with his patience, giving Toews the half step he needed to streak past. Then, Kubalik feathered a pass that gave Toews the chance to drop his perfect pass back. The Hawks have found something special in Kubalik, and when he’s given the chance, he usually delivers.
– There’s not anything Corey Crawford can do about giving up three redirected goals. The only one you can probably even be mad about would be the first goal, and you wouldn’t be mad at Crawford. You’d be mad at the Hawks’s inability to clear the puck and allowing sustained pressure. But you’ve heard that song too many times before now.
Tonight was a perfect representation of what the Hawks are. They’re a high-end talent team that needs every puck bounce to go right to win games. They had three bad bounces and lost. But the fact that they’re benching their D-man of the future for performance shows that they really think this is a playoff team with a tweak here and a healthy scratch there.
It’s a different story if the Hawks go into this game with six points instead of two. But they didn’t, and so now we’re stuck watching a team that both thinks it’s truly in a playoff run and that putting Nick Seeler in over Adam Boqvist is a solution to a problem.
This is our concern, dude.
Beer du Jour: Yeti Imperial Stout
Line of the Night: “Rides up Carpenter’s SHAFT.” –Burish on Carp’s goal
Fair warning, everything that comes next in this post is almost certainly fantasy. It’s what the Hawks should do, but almost certainly what they won’t. You know the truth, I know the truth, but the truth hasn’t found purchase in the barren wasteland of the Hawks’ braintrust in a long time. While the Hawks have lost five straight, they will use their effort last night–which was very good–and the unlucky nature of the defeats to Boston and arguably Minnesota as justification that the results will turn around sharpish and they’ll be back in it.
And on the surface, the Hawks can make that argument. They’re six points back with two games in hand on the Yotes and one on the Flames, who just happen to be next up on the schedule. And with as bad as the West is, and with the amount of teams in this jumble, it’s kind of hard to just fall out of it. It’s also nearly impossible to climb into it.
But you don’t need an archeological team to get beneath the surface to see the truth. The Hawks are in last, and they’re two points behind the Wild who very well may be giving up in that they’ve already traded Jason Zucker. This is a team that had to go 12-6-0 just get to get back into the bottom of the conversation of the playoffs. But this isn’t a team that wins 12 of 18. This is a team that wins 12 of 23, as they now have done. That’s who they are.
Right now, the Coyotes are on pace for 89 points. The Hawks are on pace for 83 (EIGHTY-THREE). The Hawks would have to play at a 101-point pace to get to 89, which might not be enough. And I guess, if you were the most cock-eyed of cock-eyed optimist, you could say they already played at a 101-point once for six weeks there. Do you honestly think they have it in them again?
And by every metric, the Hawks are where they should be. They’re one of the worst defensive teams in the league. They’ve outscored what they have created, though they’re built to do that. What’s going to get better here? Certainly not the goaltending. It can’t. Maybe DeBrincat has a two- to three-week binge in him. Maybe the power play binges for no reason other than the sense of humor of the gods. But how much can that rise above the horrific defense? How is this team going to leap over four teams?
So here’s the question the Hawks’ front office has to answer, though we know how they will: While there is value for the younger players to play in games that matter and have stakes, does that matter more than what they can gather long term by selling at the deadline? It’s clear it would not. Long-term, the Hawks are still at least a winger short (likely two) and two d-men short. If they want to say Ian Mitchell is one of those d-men, I’ll take it, but you still need one more. And none of those answers are in the system. The pipeline…she be dry.
So what can the Hawks do here? If you were to separate out Erik Gustafsson, Robin Lehner, possibly Corey Crawford, maybe Drake Caggiula, maybe Olli Maatta and think what you could collectively for all of them…maybe a 1st round pick, a 3rd or 4th round pick, and a prospect or two. The last of which probably won’t amount to more than a couple lottery tickets, but you need lottery tickets. And an additional 1st rounder could be combined with the Hawks’ 1st rounder to acquire an actual piece at the draft. You never know how that will shake out. Or you just use your two first rounders and maybe you get something for 2021-2022. Or maybe you package your first rounders to get into the top five. I don’t know, but what I do know is it gives you options you need.
Because if one summer trade and one free agent signing get you another winger and d-man, and you can solve your goaltending without breaking the bank (i.e. some combo of Talbot, Markstrom, Crawford, Halak, Murray, Greiss, Khudobin, who are all free agents and not all will be ewxpensive), now you’re ready to do more than just scrape in as a wildcard and get your brains beaten in by the Blues.
Maybe if Colliton finally has the mobile blue line–which it would be with Boqvist, Mitchell, Murphy, Keith, and acquisition to come–his high-pressure system has a chance, if you’re determined to stick with it. That’s a discussion for another time.
The biggest frustration with the Hawks over the past couple seasons, distilled down to its essence, is a complete lack of vision. Everything is made up on the fly. In the summer of 2017 it was we have to get younger and faster. So in came Saad and Murphy, out went Panarin and Hjalmarsson. And then that just stopped. Strome isn’t fast. de Haan isn’t fast. Maatta isn’t fast. Gustafsson isn’t fast. Koekkoek isn’t fast. And suddenly it was about blocking shots and being gritty. And all of it has left the Hawks spinning their wheels.
Now’s the time to show you have vision. Yeah, the playoff spot is visible, if you squint. But trust your fans to see the big picture, because they do. They’re dying for the Hawks to see it as well.
If Keith gets pissed off at another lost season, so be it. Is he really going to be a part of your next very good team at 38? Would Kane? Well, there’s your chance to really reset everything. There is opportunity here, if you only see it that way instead of the end.
Where does the vision come from, though? Do you trust Stan to do the sell-off much less the final touches of a rebuild which he hasn’t gotten right yet? Does McDonough know this? Does he have the balls to fire Stan now and get someone in to do this job? Is it too late? Will Stan follow instruction? Will he even get it?
This is the frustration, because we’re pretty damn sure these questions aren’t even being asked in those offices, much less being answered. But it’s time now. You’re done.
Or you can continue to chase this playoff spot you won’t get. Lehner and Crawford can both walk. Seabrook wants back in. You have no prospects. Maybe Mitchell doesn’t want any part of this. Where are you then?
The answer is clear to us. It’s time they see it.
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Game Time: 9:30PM CST
TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago, SportsNet+, SN360, WGN-AM 720
Slaying The Dragon: Nucks Misconduct, Canucks Army
After a thoroughly embarrassing performance in Edmonton last night, the Hawks have no time to regroup as they continue their Western Canadian tour in Vancouver tonight against the Canucks, and just in time for Sedin Twin Night as 22 and 33 go into the rafters at Rogers Arena.
