The Blackhawks were exciting early, and there were metrics and calculators and all of the other fun stuff out there that had the Blackhawks sniffing around the playoff picture for a while. Models evolve, teams shift, and the Blackhawks lost their two best, most dynamic offensive player for an extended period at the same time.
Without Connor Bedard or Frank Nazar, the playoffs are no longer something we’re talking about.
After the Blackhawks’ loss to the Penguins on Sunday night, head coach Jeff Blashill was actually more positive about the performance than the 7-3 final might allow some fans to believe is possible.
When I took a step back from the game itself — in which a lot of the underlying numbers weren’t as negative as the score — the comments from Blashill made more sense.
‘‘It was a night their chances went in in the first [period], and our chances didn’t,’’ Blashill said after the game. ‘‘Then you’re just digging yourself out of a hole that’s difficult to dig out of. We probably had more quality chances than we did last night [in Dallas], especially in that first part [of the game]. We probably gave up similar stuff. Theirs went in, and ours didn’t. That’s hockey.’’
We’ve heard and read comments from Blashill throughout the season about being focused on the process. Doing the little things right. When Nazar was slumping, he continued to preach that Nazar was competing and checking for offense; Nazar didn’t cheat to try to get offensive chances — and that was important.
Because it’s process that helps talented teams win tough games. And a commitment to process that helps teams win more games more consistently, and move from the lottery to the playoffs — and, hopefully, eventually, competing for championships.
It’s development time
Brian Bradshaw Sevald-Imagn ImagesDevelopment should be the focus — for the coaches, the front office’s decisions and our conversations. I’ve been saying it for a while (it led off our bullets yesterday), but others are chiming in on that chorus more frequently now. It’s now fully about the process, folks. Learning. Getting valuable experience. And, hopefully, getting and staying healthy in the second half of the season.
After the loss to Pittsburgh, both Ben Pope at the Chicago Sun-Times and Scott Powers at The Athletic wrote about the same theme: the process. As Powers wrote to start his piece: “Remember this now, remember this for the rest of the Chicago Blackhawks’ season: the results no longer matter this year.”
On the subject of getting experience, Oliver Moore was at center in practice on Monday. We’ll see if he sticks there for long when the Blackhawks host the Islanders tonight. But seeing him moved to center made me think of a comment from Blashill about Moore before the Blackhawks hosted the Flyers on Dec. 23:
“Ollie’s … growing in the NHL and that’s not an easy thing to do,” Blashill said. “It’s a really, really hard thing to do but I see growth in his game. That’s important. I think Ollie’s a guy who wants to be great and he works so hard to be a great player. … He has to make sure there’s still times to kind of calm his game down and that’ll be the next growth process for him is knowing when to use that great engine of his and when to calm it down a little bit. But that takes time.
He’s like a lot of our guys; they’re growing and, hopefully through experiences … like, he got the puck stripped from him from Tkachuk the other night. That’s kind of a situation where hopefully the next time he’s in that spot he remembers that and uses his body a little bit and does things different. That’s what you have to do. You have to learn at some point and he’s learning as we go.”
I got the sense that Blashill liked what he saw from Moore in the two games coming out of Christmas. With Moore and Nick Lardis, seeing adjustments from shift to shift, period to period and game to game is going to be important. And how they respond to coaching and being used in different situations is going to be telling.
Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn ImagesBlackhawks’ future focus
Does it suck that we’re back to focusing on the future beyond the current season?
If the extent of your attention span is the 2025-26 season, it most certainly does.
If you can see beyond the immediate moments and appreciate that part of the future is being shaped by the development young players like Moore, Lardis, Ryan Greene, Landon Slaggert, Artyom Levshunov, Wyatt Kaiser and others, the coming weeks and months should be exciting.
Because the last few years, I’ve been one of those who was begging for patience for the day when we could actually see the first wave(s) of talented prospects coming to the NHL. And the names I rattled off were… the ones in the previous paragraph and a few others. Some of them are here now. So let’s enjoy watching them grow into potentially impactful NHL players who help turn the Blackhawks around.
As we get closer to the Olympic break in February and teams continue to look to tweak their mix to make a playoff push, the Blackhawks could start looking to make room for other young players in their pipeline (specifically Sam Rinzel and Kevin Korchinski, maybe Aidan Thompson and Samuel Savoie).
It’s about preaching patience through the tough moments and not being final score-only with our focus. There will be more struggles, especially while Bedard and Nazar aren’t available. How — and when and where and how much — young players are being used is what I’ll be watching (and have been).
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