Everything Else

I ain’t here for dinner, I want my tank!

By Adam Hess 2399 0

The Blackhawks are now 51 games into their season and they’re currently in 19th place in the NHL standings. They’re five points back of Colorado – let that one sink in for a second – for the second wild card spot, and the Avs still have a game in hand. And last night they played the Canucks, who are currently the second worse team in the West, and they looked pretty terrible. The fact that it came just one game they were stride for stride with the Predators basically shows that any hope you may get for this team moving forward is ever-fleeting.

The Blackhawks right now are basically in the same boat as the Indianapolis Colts are in the NFL – their best player is hurt and no one really knows what the situation is, because the team won’t say anything; with said star player, they’re probably a playoff team, but without him, they’re a bottom feeder. The Colts have a top-3 pick in the NFL draft in April, and the Blackhawks are looking like they’re going to have a good shot at one. And maybe they should start doing whatever they can to maximize that potential.

The Crawford situation has become a lose-lose for the Blackhawks. Crow’s health is obviously the most important thing, and you don’t want to rush him back and risk anything going wrong in the future because he is going to be the key to this team contending in the years to come. And we’re seeing how well things are going without him – you have two dudes who never spent significant time in the NHL trying each game to not play as bad as they did last game. So you don’t want to rush Crow back, but without him you’re up shit’s creek without a paddle.

Then you also have the question of whether Crawford coming back this year at all is really even worth it, even if you don’t rush it. We’ve already seen reports that he might miss the whole season, so it may not be a stretch to say that the Hawks bringing him back at all could be a form of rushing him back. And even if he does come back and squeeze you into a playoff spot, is it really going to be worth playing those extra games just to more than likely get bounced by Nashville or God forbid WINNIPEG? Even if your draft lottery odds are the longest shot, that’s better chance at the apparently generational talent of Rasmus Dahlin than zero.

And really, Dahlin is probably the kind of player that can get the Blackhawks back to where they want to be. The podcast crew discussed this week how the future at forward is looking fine, but there is absolutely no help coming on the back end. A lot of reports seem to indicate Dahlin is the best blue line prospect to be in the draft in a long fuckin’ time. He won’t fix all of their issues, but he’d be an instant jolt to a blue line that needs one badly, and if everything works out, he’s your next Duncan Keith. So it’d make a lot of sense for Stan to look at doing whatever he can to increase his odds of landing that kind of player.

Yeah, tank is a dirty word, but that strategy probably makes the most sense for the Blackhawks for the remainder of this season.

The problem is that, even if that was a route Stan wanted to go, he pretty much has no way of doing so. He has no tradeable assets that he’d be willing (or allowed) to part with. The only player that it could make sense to move and that might bring anything resembling value in return is Anisimov, but he has a full NMC. I guess the only good news on this part of it is that the roster they have at present has been bad enough to get them where they are already, so there’s no reason they can’t just keep spiraling.

But then there is the issue of the coach, who wouldn’t agree to participate in a tank if you held a gun to his head. For better or worse, winning is what Q does, and all he wants to do. He doesn’t even have the kind of Mike Babcock patience to let one year go to shit in hopes of the next several being significantly better. It’s not within his nature to do that. So in order to pull off a tank job, Stan would have to fire Q, and you know McD isn’t about to let that happen.

So you just have to hope now that the Hawks show enough patience and sense with Crawford as to not bring him back unnecessarily. And maybe in doing that, they generate their own form of an internal tank. And then we put our all of our hopes and dreams on the outcome of several ping pong balls. It’s the good ol’ hockey game.

Everything Else

Before Firing Q, Ask The Right Questions…Then You’ll Probably Fire Q

By Sam Fels 4110 0

For the first time, I’ve seen a real wave of sentiment that the Hawks need to make a major change behind the bench. Some have suggested in the front office. We joke about it here a lot, and we certainly criticize the decorated Hawks coach more than most. But it’s never so simple, and before the Hawks or anyone could conclude that this would be the right course of action one has to figure out what the intent of this season and what is really going on here first.

As we’ve talked about at length on the podcast, it’s hard to know what to think when we don’t know what exactly what Stan Bowman had in mind for this season. If the Hawks thought they could or were in any way inclined to be as transparent as other teams in town, what would they have told us before the season? I can’t take credit for the idea, it’s Fifth Feather’s, but there’s two ways this could have gone.

One is that this is truly a transitional season for the Hawks. One they probably should have embarked on a year ago or maybe even right after the last Cup, but that’s another discussion. That if they’d said while they wish to be competitive and make the playoffs, the main objective of this season was to bed in Schmaltz, DeBrincat, Forsling (whoops), now Duclair, Murphy, and let’s throw in Hinostroza and Sikura at the end for funsies (Kampf too if you want). That really what they wanted to get these players reps, ingrained, evaluated, and then have whoever makes the cut ready for one last assault on the summit next year, which is all you’re going to get with the aging “Core Five.”

And on that level, some of the decisions make some sense? I have to put a “?” there because I’m not really sure. If you wanted to see how Forsling and Rutta would do in the deep end, you’d give them the most d-zone starts of everyone. Which Q did. I guess if you squint you’d see if Murphy can play both sides, which he’s proven he can. But that seems a stretch. You’d try Top Cat as a playmaker on a lot of lines instead of a finisher…maybe? This is Schmaltz’s first real run at center, which you’d definitely do.

But on this level, the mistakes are greater than that. It was clear early on that Forsling wasn’t built to start so much in his own end, and a player who openly talked about losing confidence last year was having his ravaged again by such usage. He was booted off the power play even though that should be something he specializes in. Top Cat set all kinds of records playing the left side in the OHL, and has played there for about 12 minutes here. Isn’t it more prudent to build a player up in the softest spot to have success when he’s 19? And then see what his flexibility is? You could argue it took far too long to let Schmaltz just stay in the middle.

The handling of Murphy is the real red X here, and once again speaks to discord from front office to behind the bench which is the same shit we’ve talked about for years that the Hawks were talented enough to play over in the past but aren’t now. His scratches are simply petulant, given that he’s been the Hawks best d-man over the season. This is Q still bitching that his toy in Hammer–his declining, aging, slowing toy that was about to be more expensive–was taken away. While he’s certainly within his rights to be cranky, did Stan and Q never have a meeting after last season where it was laid out what the plan was? Should your coach be so gobsmacked at a trade as Q clearly was last summer? While we’ve seen the problems when Q gets a say in player decisions, or anyone above Stan does as well, I’m not sure that he should be in the dark either.

The more I watch this team the more I think this really was the plan, because everything Stan has done has been to get younger, faster, cheaper, and open up more space for his draft picks which hasn’t always been the case. And maybe if this team is ready to “go for it” next year (highly debatable what that would actually result in), you’d want Q there because that’s what he does. He’s just not the best for development, and that ignores whether or not some of the veterans have tired of his voice (which we’ll never prove).

If you take the other tack, that this year was about “ONE GOAL” as it always is, it’s gets murkier. There isn’t much Q can do to overcome the loss of Corey Crawford. Q can’t make Toews and Saad score. But even before that, if the goal was to amass as many points as possible. then why were Forsling and Rutta in the d-zone so much and on the kill? Why is Patrick Sharp anywhere near the top six? How can you have this power play? And how can it change personnel and tactics seemingly every opportunity? The scratching of Murphy makes even less sense in this context. Gustafsson and Oesterle going from either the minors or pressbox straight onto both special teams is confounding. If it was about development, it would make slightly more sense, but wouldn’t at least Oesterle have played from jump street?

These are all answers we won’t get because I don’t know what the long term or even short term goals were here. The simplest explanation is that Stan is remaking the entire roster under that “Core Five” (yes, Seabrook doesn’t really count anymore but he’s not going anywhere) either to give them one last chance either next year or preparing the ground for when they aren’t the front of this team anymore. But it doesn’t seem like his coach is playing the same game, once again.

And if that’s going to be the case going forward, one has to go. And Stan’s never gotten to hire a coach before.

 

Everything Else

The Secrecy To Nowhere Leads To Me, Q, Kid Rock, Why Hockey Is The Circus Clown Of Sports

By Sam Fels 2588 0

Took a few days off myself during the bye and let the proletariat handle it. So clearly there’s some stuff to get through since if you give the Hawks enough time without any games they probably will trip over their own dicks.

-I can’t add too much to what Pullega and Rose have put up over the past couple days about Corey Crawford. It’s once again proof that trying to shroud yourself in secrecy just isn’t going to work.

Some people want to claim that the Hawks and really most NHL teams’ sprint to the stronghold of information blackouts springs from the NFL’s. NFL coaches are a poisonous combination of paranoid to the point of tin foil chapeaus, while also convinced of their own genius that their systems and gameplans should be studied at Wharton if not The Louvre for generations (though a fun game might be getting NFL coaches to define The Louvre, if not spell it). This is what happens when you give guys a full week of nothing to do but convince themselves of threats as they work 19-hour days and can’t remember the names of their daughters.

I don’t think hockey’s comes from that. It’s part that, sure, but hockey coaches and execs have always been too dismissive/stupid/mealy-mouthed to actually share information. The fear has always been that if you announce a player has an ankle problem, every player on your next opponent is basically going to do everything up to and including chair-shots on said ankle. Hockey being hockey, this isn’t totally far-fetched.

But with the Hawks, they should have learned long ago that if you have a period of silence, anything and everything is eventually going to fill up that void with all sorts of noise and you’re going to end up speaking about it anyway. And that’s where the Hawks find themselves.

I don’t know what they hoped to gain by plugging their fingers in their ears and shouting the chorus to “Caravan” as a team policy. This was always going to happen. Maybe they feared exposure of once again not handling a head injury correctly. Here’s an idea, and I know this is totally out there but maybe next time just handle the head injury correctly?

-This Crawford stuff has buried another nugget from Hawks fans’ favorite radio host Dan Bernstein on 670 The Score. While discussing the Crow weirdness he also let it be known that behind closed doors Joel Quenneville is still seething about the trade of Niklas Hjalmarsson. I couldn’t help but joke in my head that when the discussion on the afternoon show turned to whether or not Hawks fans watched other teams that maybe they should ask if the coach does as well.

By any measure, Hjalmarsson has been bad on a really bad Coyotes team this year. And if you were paying attention you saw a precipitous decline in the second half of last year. While his shot-blocking certainly got the most slobber treatment from Eddie O and apparently Q himself (and this is something that really needs to stop because you shouldn’t aim to be blocking shots as a go-to), that was far from Hammer’s most important attribute. While he was a stay-at-home d-man, he had greater mobility than most who fit that role. Which meant much like Keith and Oduya and even Seabrook back in the day, he could step up at his line and squeeze the space for opponents while not having to fear being beat to the outside. In addition, there may not have been a better Hawk d-man at making that 5-10 foot pass under duress, often blind, from the corner or below the goal line to the front of the net to a waiting Hawks center to release all the pressure and get the Hawks out of the zone.

Well, Hammer lost the step that allowed him to step up at his line. He lost the half-step to make that and other breakout passes as often as he could. And that’s not going to get better.

But it certainly explains the Connor Murphy scratchings at the slightest misstep #5 makes. It would hardly be the first time that Q has tried to either make a point to his GM, or simply stick it to him. Brad Richards starting behind Andrew Shaw on the center depth chart to start a season comes to mind, as does Steve Montador starting a season on the wing or Antoine Vermette playing a wing after arrival. There are others. Murphy is being held to an at-times unfair scale simply because his coach cries on a framed picture of a certain Swede before going to bed at night. Even with that, he’s been the Hawks best d-man by some distance this season.

This is where you wish the Hawks though they could be as transparently operated as both baseball teams in town are at the moment. Because if Stan truly envisioned this as a “transitional” season, and his quotes suggest he very well might have, he’d finally have a cudgel over his coach. If this is about getting the Schmaltzes and DeBrincats and Forslings of the world grounded, as well as getting Murphy into the Hawks’ “Martz-ian” system, Stan would have evidence to take to his bosses/fans about how his coach is getting in the way. And it would keep Q in line or maybe Stan would finally get to hire his own coach that he actually has a relationship with.

Instead, we get more of the same push and pull between coach and GM, and at this point it’s tiresome for all.

-I don’t know there’s much more I can add to the hysterical-if-it-wasn’t-sad choice of Kid Rock to perform at the All-Star game. The best case scenario for the NHL is that they’re just wildly ignorant, which isn’t encouraging. The simplistic explanation is that someone simply saw a google photo of him in a Red Wings jersey at a game and thought that was enough. Does he still do that now that they suck? Or is he more in the CM Punk fashion where he’s only around if it helps his brand?

Once again hockey has quivered in fear of a portion of the fanbase it would actually probably rather do without, and that’s the old angry white guy. And yes, if you listen to Kid Rock you’re old now. Sorry. You also suck, and I would gladly trade my life to bring Warren Zevon back to his only long enough so he could impale Kid on a flaming spear for stealing his song.

It’s that fanbase that keeps hockey from banning fighting which it would really like to, or enforcing the rules even harder to open up the game, or heavily suspending players for hits to the head/dirty play. But no, the NHL is terrified that the angry white dude who measures his own dick by how “tough” he perceives the sport he watches to be we’ll up and leave if they ever did any of this. You and I both know he won’t, because he has nowhere else to go (unless they did all this and Vince McMahon was convinced he could start an XHL and oh god this is going to happen isn’t it?), but the NHL has always operated out of fear and ignorance. Which is why they won’t backtrack on this either, although they’ll continue to celebrate Will O’Ree and Hockey Is For Everyone and You Can Play right along with it. Good stuff there.

Which is why it will always be a joke to most everyone else.

 

Everything Else

There Ain’t No V in Concussion, My Frent

By John Pullega 2914 0

With most vacations, the vacation itself is a thousand times more stressful and frustrating than whatever it was you were trying to get away from. This bye week is no different.

As Rose covered yesterday, the Hawks announced that Corey Crawford had vertigo-like symptoms. Then, later on yesterday, Scotty Bowman went on (BIG VOICE GUY) BOB MCCOWN’S PRIME TIME SPORTS hullabaloo and said, with nary a quiver in his voice, that Crawford was really suffering from post-concussion symptoms (2:02:30 in the clip). Later that day, Lazerus reported that Scotty was “guessing” and not sharing insider information.

This, of course, is Grade A fucking NARRATIVE horseshit (on the organ-I-zaton, not Lazerus).

The Blackhawks have a long and infamous history with deflecting and mismanaging concussions.

Recall that legit 17-seconds legend and meatball superhero Dave Bolland faced schoolyard giggles, and pointing and laughing at how long it took him to recover from his concussion back in 2011, all the while dealing with depression, that common ghoul that tends to walk hand in hand with brain injuries.

Recall that one of the reasons Jeremy Morin got shipped out the first time was because he took too long for everyone’s liking coming back from a concussion in 2012. And before he got shipped out, he fought everything in sight to show Q the MORE that the Hawks’s brass always complained wasn’t there. If there’s a better way to proactively protect a player with a history of brain injuries than having him get punched in the face over and over to prove that he’s willing and able to flex nuts, I’d like to hear it.

Recall that in 2014, after Toews got splattered on the boards by Dennis Seidenberg—subsequently grabbing his head and skating with the grace of a drunk with puke in his shoes—neither Quenneville nor the Hawks’s training staff had the foresight to take him off the ice immediately, instead opting to let him finish off a power play. This came after 2012, when Toews played several games with a concussion before getting shut down.

Recall that Steve Montador’s family still has a lawsuit pending against the league that alleges, among other things, that Montador received four concussions over three months with the Blackhawks.

The vagueness and silence always evolves in the same way, from “upper body injury” to “dealing with some soreness” to “we’ll see.” Then, when it becomes more apparent that someone’s going to be out for an extended time, upper body turns into dizziness or, in Crow’s case, vertigo. That way, when the diagnosis the brain trust refused to admit all along becomes the diagnosis they’re forced to admit, they can throw up their hands and say, “Whoa, we just thought it was something less serious. Honest!” And when you’re named in a lawsuit that claims that your team put Montador in a position to have not just one, but FOUR concussions in just three months, contributing to his CTE and death, feigning ignorance is really all you have left.

And King Dickhead Gary Bettman—who gives mid 90s Hunter Hearst Helmsley a run for his weaselly heel money—plays a role in how teams handle concussions. Let’s not forget that the NHL is still embroiled in a lawsuit that alleges that the league failed to ensure the safety of players’ brains, letting them play through concussions and other head injuries with full knowledge of what that could lead to and without telling them.

As the face of ownership, Bettman ought to have to answer for the defense calling players participating in the lawsuit “mere puppets” on a “cash grab” (which, probably not coincidentally, echoes a common defense we heard surrounding Doughty and Garbage Dick in the past).

He should be able to offer at least some sort of explanation for why the NHL still refuses to acknowledge the link between CTE and head trauma.

If you want to go to John Galtian levels of selfishness, Bettman should have to answer for why the owners he represents are so willing to mishandle their assets to the league’s detriment, letting star players on popular teams that line the league’s coffers suffer long-term injuries, vicariously damaging the league’s bottom line in the process.

Instead, we get radio silence, and status quo reigns.

But back here, given the Blackhawks’s experience with concussions, at what point do Quenneville and Bowman say enough? It may not be their job to diagnose brain injuries, but it IS their job to, in the most heartless terms, protect their assets. Is this middling season of what-ifs and maybes really worth the long-term health of the best goaltender the Hawks have had since Belfour? Apparently, because they brought him back off a concussion awfully fast, yet again.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that any athlete in Chicago sports history ever got Dangerfielded more often than Crow, from fans and franchise alike. He doesn’t deserve any of this, as both a player and a person.

So here we sit, having to wonder what the fuck is going on with the Hawks’s best player amid innuendo from the team and silence from the league. And because we can only guess at what happened, that’s what I’m going to do.

Since Evgeni “My Face Looks How My Name Sounds” Malkin railroaded Crawford in November, Crawford’s been dealing with a concussion. Because the front office and coaching staff are either too stupid to know or too callous to care, they sent Crawford back out too early in an attempt to salvage points they desperately needed for the deep playoff run they envisioned to wash the taste of two quick exits out of their mouths.

When Crawford’s performances betrayed his health against Dallas and New Jersey in December, the Hawks took advantage, using them as cover to justify taking him out for undisclosed reasons. The undisclosed reason, of course, was a concussion that Crawford should not have been playing through.

With vocal skepticism mounting, the organ-I-zation dripped rumors about vertigo, which is close enough to a concussion to feign ignorance, be believable, and take some of the liability off the team’s latest botch. Then, when people expressed outrage at the possibility that the Hawks knowingly trotted Crawford out too soon, Stan Bowman called his father to take the bullet and indirectly admit that Crawford indeed did have a concussion (or post-concussion symptoms), because he knew it would bounce off the venerable and untouchable Scotty much more easily than it would Stan, given his office’s egregiously bad history with concussions.

Finally, Scotty’s walk back was the little injection of controlled confusion the organ-I-zation needed to have everyone following the drama throw up their hands and say “Oh, who knows?!” Lather, rinse, repeat.

The excuses for Crawford’s absence smell an awful lot like organ-I-zational horseshit. But when the guys running the team and the league have shown time and again that they can be gigantic asses about handling head injuries, should we expect anything else?

Everything Else

Asked for a piece of mine, you charged me for it

By Adam Hess 2973 0

One of the more ironic things about Chicago sports is how often the teams in this town get referred to as “storied franchises” despite most of them not really having great stories. Run down the list and not a single of the major sports teams in the city have won more than six championships in their given sport, and only the Blackhawks and Bulls have shown any level of world dominance style success in anyone’s recent memory (the Cubs may get there, but please don’t try to convince me they’re already there).

I am normally an overly optimistic sports fan when it comes to my teams, so it’s been kind of a weird juxtaposition for me to hold the belief that my favorite teams are “destination teams” for players while also realizing they don’t quite have the history to back up that belief. Add the fact that the various ownership and management groups of the Chicago franchises don’t have the best track records – especially among fans – and maybe Chicago sports franchises have a reputation they haven’t quite earned.

Which is why I was intrigued by this poll posted on Twitter by Cheer The Anthem last week:

It’s a very clouded question, because outside of Theo/Jed, Chicago’s  sports teams really have very questionable front offices. GarPax chased an elite player in Jimmy Butler out of town rather than ever making a real effort at building a championship team around him, so I’m not in the least bit surprised that they were low on the list. Even as a White Sox fan I was surprised Rick Hahn finished so high, because the question was referencing the last three years, and not just one. Hahn couldn’t build a winner around Chris Sale, Jose Abreu, Adam Eaton, Jose Quintana, and other young, controllable players, so one year of very good trades only makes up for so much of that.

Honestly, I voted for Ryan Pace, not because I think he’s done an incredible job with the Bears in the last three years, but because he’s the only GM on the list who has his team essentially where he expected to have them three years ago, and the Bears seem to be headed in the right direction. Again, I’m an optimist.

But honestly, I think the fact that Stan Bowman won the vote there is kind of laughable. Now, I know the list isn’t exactly stuffed full of incredible GMs, but Bowman has been damn near pitiful over the past three years. Second City Hockey has made posts tracking the major moves Bowman has made over the past three years, so I went back and reviewed those lists (see them here – 2015, 2016, 2017), and basically rated them as either Good, Whatever, or Bad using entirely my own opinion. This was actually pretty easy, and I think most people would probably agree with my evaluations.

For brevity I won’t post my rating for every single transaction, but here’s how it shook out – 2015 had seven good moves, seven whatever moves, and eight bad moves, so I’d chalk that up as a “whatever” year that leans a bit toward bad. The good moves included signing Artemi Panarin, the Brandon Saad trade, and re-signing Anisimov. The bad moves included the Brent Seabrook extension, Patrick Sharp trade, and the David Rundblad extension. Seriously, the Seabrook extension was so bad, even when it was signed. The nearly $1-million raise for an aging player, plus the max term, and the full NMC, all when StanBo wasn’t even negotiating against anybody. Just embarrassing, and it clearly hasn’t aged well.

The moves made in 2017 were mostly “whatever” moves, and I didn’t actually rate anything as bad. The two moves that I consider especially good were the Scott Darling trade and Panarin/Saad swap. The Darling trade was pretty much masterful work, because to get a third round pick for a guy that otherwise would’ve walked for free is a really good move. The other big move of the year, the Hjalmarsson/Murphy swap, I graded as Whatever, which is probably bad, but Murphy has been fine this year and there is time for that move to pan out. And Stan started 2018 off right with a pretty good deal on Wednesday night, swapping Richard Panik for Anthony Duclair, making his team younger and faster while also saving cap space.

In the middle of all of that was 2016, which rated out with four good moves, four bad moves, and eleven whatever moves. But don’t let those numbers fool you, 2016 was awful for Bowman, and really could end up proving as the year that ultimately un-did all that he had built up here in Chicago. The best move he made was trading Andrew Shaw for two draft picks, one of which became our Special Boy Top Cat. The next best move was trading Jeremy Morin for Richard Panik. Panik hasn’t been awful, but that move is hardly anything to write home about. I also rated re-signing Q as good, so if you wanna take that out since it isn’t directly roster related, there’s only three good moves. But the bad moves were very, very bad.

Starting with the Andrew Ladd trade, which basically undid most of the goodness of the original Brandon Saad trade. Marko Dano hasn’t quite delivered on some of the promised potential, but I think his game was well suited for the Hawks’ style, and there’s a chance that had he been afforded more playing time with the Hawks in Chicago, he’d be a serviceable-or-maybe-good forward for them now, and probably at least better than the likes of Tommy Wingels or Lance Bouma. Plus the Hawks also gave up a first round pick in the deal. From the moment it was completed, it was a trade that was going to need a Cup to justify it. But Ladd brought them basically nothing worth mentioning down the stretch of the season and the Hawks were bounced by St. Louis in the first round. Little did we know this might have been the first domino that started the downfall of the Hawks “dynasty.”

Then there was the Philip Danault trade, which basically made the eventual overpriced Marcus Kruger contract extension not just necessary, but really Stan’s only option if the team was gonna have any semblance of a checking line in 2016-17. Trading Danault – who was already a very promising defensive forward with the potential to be Kruger 2.0 but with a bit more offensive upside – and other assets for Tomas Fleischmann and Dale Weise proved to be another big mistake. Weise and “Flash” were supposed to provide enviable forward depth for the Hawks as they prepared to go on a run to repeat as Cup champs. Instead they, like Ladd, didn’t provide much worth mentioning and were gone in the summer. Danault has gone on to be good bottom six forward for the Habs, with 22 points in 42 games this year and a CF of 54.56%. Ho hum.

But the real killer came in the summer with the trade that might end up defining Stan Bowman’s time as Blackhawks GM even more than his rebuilding of the team for the two Cup wins, at least in the minds of most of the hooligans who write words on this website. We always knew trading Bryan Bickell was going to be hard, and definitely was going to require some sweetening. It shouldn’t have required sweetening in the form of Teuvo Teravainen. Teuvo isn’t exactly a generational talent, but he’s been very good for Carolina over the past year and a half. He posted an encouraging 42 points in 81 games last year, and has been on a tear this year with 33 points (11G, 22A) in 41 games. He’s also posted a 55.69 CF% this season. That kind of production and possession dominance would be huge for the Blackhawks this year, but instead we have to watch the NHL Twitter account continually tweet videos of the original Very Special Boy do good things for the fuckin Hurricanes. AND I JUST GOT A TEUVO JERSEY LIKE A 10 MONTHS BEFORE THAT. I will not forgive Stan for this.

Now, every GM is prone to bad moves, and probably even prone to a series of them from time to time. Peter Chiarelli has chased bona fide stars away from his teams more times than we can count, and Jim Benning has only made like one good deal so far during his tenure in Vancover. But what Stan Bowman did in 2016, in essentially two trades, was plant a fucking iceberg in the path of the Titanic ship he had built. Again, imagine what this team would look like with Teuvo and Danault in tow instead of Wingels and/or Bouma. That kind of legitimate forward depth would help make up for a lot of the shortcomings on the Hawks embattled blue line, and probably have them closer to being a contender than a last place team.

And look, I don’t mean to say that Stan is a bad GM in general, because he isn’t. He did manage to retool his 2010 Cup winner into a team that was basically the best in the NHL over a 3-year stretch from 2013-2015, so maybe he can still do that here. And at least some of his bad moves were only made necessary because the Loonie went to shit, and took the NHL’s salary cap with it. But there isn’t much exciting talent in the pipeline, and the best players on his NHL squad are declining much too quickly for anyone’s liking. And he put himself in this position.

So don’t go telling me that Stan Bowman is the best GM in Chicago over the last three years. He literally took a Stanley Cup Champion and stripped it down to what is currently barely better than a last place team, all while thinking, as far as we can tell, that he was making his team better. He just about slammed his team’s championship window shut while trying to keep it open. At least his last name still carries some weight in the NHL.

Everything Else

Duclair! Get Your Ass Out Here You’re Holdin’ Up The Show!

By Sam Fels 2627 0

You’ll just have to take my word for it, but just a couple days ago and Matt McClure and I were wasting time instead of working as we usually are doing, we speculated about things the Hawks might do trade-wise. We know Stan Bowman has usually preferred to makes his moves before the deadline, when prices are a tad cheaper and there’s less competition. That’s how Michael Frolik came here. You add in the fact that the Hawks might not be able to wait until the deadline because of the shape they’re in (oh you don’t know…) and you can see why there was some urgency here. We thought the Hawks weren’t going to give up any real pieces or make a big splash, and the beaten favorite is something they love to try.

We said Anthony Duclair seemed like a likely target.

Well, we got one right. Anthony Duclair is headed to Chicago along with Adam Clendening, the prodigal son, in exchange for Richard Panik and Laurent Dauphin.

The headline here is Duclair, who somehow is still only 22 even though you’ve been hearing his name for years. The attraction to Duclair is obvious. He’s swift, and though only 5-11 plays a much bigger game, and there is a high amount of skill here. This is a player who managed 20 goals at age 20 in Arizona, where he was on the top line and facing tougher competition than he probably should have because quite simply there wasn’t anyone else to.

The red flags are clear, though. He followed that season up with a barf-belch of a ’16-’17 that saw him get sent down for a portion of the season. Duclair has nine goals in 33 games this year, which is not nothing, but there is more to be mined. If he wants it to be, which seems to be the rep with him. The Hawks are right in thinking that if he can’t put it together here, especially with a coach showing new patience in young players, that it’s never going to happen.

Duclair’s best season two years ago came while playing with Max Domi, and there are options for him to do that here. He’s a left shot so playing him with Kane doesn’t really add up, but he could be hellish on a forecheck with Saad and Toews or give DeBrincat and Kampf/Anisimov more to work with than Sharp. It would sadly keep Top Cat on the right side when he should be on the left but Duclair can flip as well.

All of Duclair’s metrics this year are well ahead of the Yotes’ team rates, though that really isn’t much of a claim. More encouragingly, Duclair’s scoring rate at even-strength is the highest of his career right now, at 0.84 per 60. He’s also averaging more attempts and individual scoring chances at evens than he ever has, and more shots. He’s not quite getting the luck shooting-percentage-wise at evens that he did two years ago, but the process is there if the results are not. And oh yes, he’s averaging way more hits per 60 than he ever has, if you’re into that sort of thing.

While it would be fun to sit here and laugh about how Richard Panik turned into Richard Panik again, the reality is the Hawks got him for basically nothing (we still love you, Jeremy Morin), turned him into a younger, cheaper, more talented player that can be part of the solution for a long time here. You can’t argue with that.

The two minor leaguers won’t matter. Laurent Dauphin showed a little in the preseason, but either didn’t show enough in Rockford, or Kampf has shown enough to leap ahead of him on the depth chart, or they’re now convinced Schmaltz is a center which locks down three center spots on the big club for the foreseeable future, or all of the above. Clendening is Rockford depth, because I have to imagine Gustafsson or Pokka or both are going to be involved in future deals. If they were going to be anything, we’d probably know by now.

There is risk in this. You can see similarities between Duclair and Tomas Jurco, though Jurco never had the success in the NHL that Duclair had two years ago. High-talented guys who have just not put it together full-time yet that teams are ready to move on from. If motivation or focus is the problem, sticking him in that dressing room should be a cure he’s looking for. We’ll excuse him if he and many others didn’t quite bring it while playing out the string in the desert in front of friends and family only. He’ll get no such luxury here.

It has potential to be a blockbuster deal. If it’s the opposite, Duclair goes RFA in the summer and you have all of Panik’s cap space to play with. So… why the fuck not?

 

Everything Else

Our Special Boy, Who Was Too Sweet For This World

By Sam Fels 3974 0

A couple times a week, I put myself through a ritual that makes me feel all the things. It provides joy and excitement, while also putting a mythical flaming dagger right into my chest cavity. It makes me pump my fist, and then direct that fist right into my own teeth/balls, whatever I’m feeling at the moment.

It’s watching Teuvo Teravainen play.

Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t. Our Special Boy, our Finn of Dragons, our Turbo Targaryn, is lighting it up in Raleigh. He’s got 15 points in 17 games. Some of that is piling up eight points in his last four games, but it’s been ridiculous. He’s carrying a +5.0 relative Corsi-percentage on the best Corsi team in the league. He’s got a +3.8 relative xGF% on one of the better ones in the NHL.

But numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to watch him, Sebastien Aho, and Jordan Staal. Staal has 15 points in 17 games as well, the post points-per-game he’s ever had in his career. Teuvo and Aho on some shifts just look like they’re playing a different sport.

It’s amazing what happens when you just let a young player do what he does best. Those whipped passes without looking that Teuvo only got to flash here on occasion, where the puck is only on his stick for a blink before he’s finding someone on the other side of the ice, are heavily featured. He’s added a shooting-mentality at times, which the Hawks could never get through to him, though they pretty much asked him to sacrifice everything else to do so. The little fucker even scored on a slapshot against the Stars to kick off his natural hat trick on Monday.

It’s pleasure you usually have to pay for, mixed with pain… you usually have to pay for. Because it shouldn’t be happening there. When Stan Bowman’s run comes to an end, no matter when, losing Teuvo Teravainen for nothing, merely to clear Bryan Bickell’s contract, might end up his biggest mistake. What would he look like on a line with Alex DeBrincat right now? What would the whole forward corps look like with Teuvo’s skills and flexibility?

It shouldn’t be this way. It’s a huge indictment on the way the Hawks used to run (still do?) that someone’s souring on Teuvo could become an organization-wide feeling. This is a player who took over a Stanley Cup Final game at the age of 20 in the 3rd period. He kick-started a near-miracle comeback in Anaheim in Game 5. His line came up with three of the biggest goals in that run in ’15–the winners in Games 1 and 5 in the Final and the OT winner in Game 4 against the Ducks.

And yet the Hawks could only see what wasn’t there. He wasn’t big enough, even though his hands and mind would have compensated in the middle. He didn’t shoot enough or forecheck hard enough, even though his vision would have made him the clear second-best playmaker on the team, behind only one of the league’s best in Patrick Kane.

Stan and Q will never suffer for it, as all they have to do is point at their three banners. And even if they’d kept Teuvo, after this latest contract is up he might have been too expensive then.

This is the NHL they want. Where if you make the mistake of paying someone like Brent Seabrook, you lose Teuvo and the chance to have Panarin and Saad together and/or Stephen Johns or Nick Leddy. That doesn’t make Stan an idiot. It just makes him not perfect.

I try to just enjoy Teuvo without any of the context. But it’s impossible. Some ex’s never escape your mind. You always wonder…

Everything Else

So This Is Your Roster

By 1773

Couple nuggets the past couple days that pretty much lead one to believe this is your Hawks team taking the ice in October, if you didn’t already believe that. We have this from friend of the program Scott Powers that the Hawks aren’t going to LTIR Hossa until the season begins. And then there was Mirtle’s piece yesterday in Toronto’s Athletic about how the Leafs are using summer LTIR. If you’re getting confused, you’re not alone.

Ever since the announcement that Hossa wouldn’t play this season, Stan Bowman has been strongly hinting he didn’t want to use LTIR until the season began, essentially being cap compliant with Hossa’s contract on the books when the puck drops, because he wanted “flexibility” during the season. And that’s reasonable enough. Except it doesn’t appear to be that simple.

Everything Else

Tardy Ruthlessness

By 1583

The NHL offseason has basically become pretty much every fan laughing at the stupid decisions of GMs across the league, and fans of those teams those GMs preside over trying to sell themselves on others that they weren’t THAT stupid. Some of that has reached these pastures, and maybe some of it is deserved.

It seems to me that possibly every NHL GM just hasn’t figured out how ruthless you have to be in this hard cap. Or maybe they know it, and just can’t bring themselves to do it. Or maybe mechanizations within the organization haven’t allowed them to do so. I think that’s what we’re seeing here with the Hawks and Stan Bowman.

While the Penguins will be used as the model, it’s probably important to remember their three Cups and four finals span three coaches and two GMs. So Jim Rutherford could have looked at the roster he got from Ray Shero and not feel the same attachments. And the Penguins roster from their first champion to the second and third only retains three and a half important elements in Crosby, Malkin, Letang, and Fleury if you want to count him, though he wasn’t supposed to be involved at all for the last two.

Everything Else

Hossa Fallout, Schedule, And Argle Bargle

By 1647

Few things to clean up today:

-Stan and Q had their press conference today to discuss Marian Hossa and the draft. Q had the look of a man who just saw his one top six winger who can backcheck effectively ripped away from him, because he is. There’s not much Q can do at the moment, as we get the feeling he’s going to be less involved on free agency and trades and personnel decisions than he’s been.

So it came to Stan, who had to wax poetic about how complicated it’s going to be using Hossa’s cap space in LTIR. And he’s right, it isn’t as simple as most believe.