It’s funny on this blog, because there are certain players who we have spent as much time defending as we have criticizing. Brent Seabrook may top the list. After he signed his extension, it felt like once a week we had to explain to people why having two Canadian Olympic defensemen on the team for the long haul was a good idea. Then, when Seabrook was carrying around three pounds of nachos in his upper intestine, or at least sure skated like it, we kept having to point out just how sluggish he looked and how much Keith was bailing his overstuffed ass out (in particular to one certain Hawks blogger).

And then Seabrook had last season, where he looked better, skated better, played better, cemented himself as something of the heartbeat of the whole dressing room, and no one said anything. Which is preferable. Of course, with Biscuit heading into a free agent season and every Hawks fan having Cap Paranoia (Self-Destroyah’!…AND IT GOES LIKE THIS!), he’s probably headed in for a season of everyone looking at him quite intensely, trying to figure out if he’s worth paying what he very well might ask (which could be somewhere between $7-8 million per).