So, in case you’ve been off the interwebs and social media over the past… three weeks or so, the Chicago Blackhawks have become a lightning rod for criticism from all over the hockey world. Everyone wants to weigh in and pile on the Hawks’ 31st-ranked situation.
Blame is being handed out like Halloween candy by the Blackhawks’ fan base, with the front office and coaches being the principal recipients of the angst. After getting rudely dismissed by the defending champions in Carolina on Saturday night, the temperature around the team reached a boiling point.
Head coach Jeff Blashill was asked after Monday’s practice about the internal meetings that took place after the ugly loss in Carolina and what the organization is assessing.
“Generally I think we do anyways, but I’d say intensified assessing where we’re at, where our game’s at, obviously what areas can we improve, what do we need to improve at, and then how do you improve at those areas?” Blashill said. “I think that’s kind of what went into yesterday specifically I would say and in this morning just with our staff and our management group, trying to identify those areas and then, once identified, how we’re going to get better at them. And you can look at full scale changes, you can look at tweaks. I think mid-season certainly prefer tweaks to full scale changes and that’s kinda of what we’re looking at right now.”
Blackhawks head coach Jeff BlashillHere’s what Blashill said are the Blackhawks’ two priorities right now:
No. 1: Giving up fewer scoring chances
“By giving up less chances, you put yourself in position to win more games and you’re not going to win every one of them, but all of a sudden if you’re in every game, you win a lot more of them. That’s just the reality of the odds. …
“How do you do that? Number one is just, honestly, it’s your play with the puck because if you have the puck more, you’re generally not giving up chances. So that’s either our D doing a good job moving the puck out of our end, our forwards managing the puck through the neutral zone into the O zone so that we have the puck more. So that would be one.”
No. 2: Basic defending
“It’s just the principles of defending, making sure it’s stick on puck body on body. They got to go through you to get to the net, that kind of defending. And then specifically, today we worked on our D zone in our track decisions. And so making sure D zone wise, we felt like probably a few areas we identified. One was certainly just our net front coverage and making sure that our D do a better job of owning both posts. And we end up with a triangle around that net with our center men, the way that we play in not getting tied up or getting to the wrong post.
“A lot of times they’re going to have to stay loose so they’re in position, making sure there’s no rebounds on the back post or no plays the back post. And then just our forwards handling the high movement when there’s a lot of high movement. And then just in terms of track, it’s honestly probably more, we want to be a team that’s on top of you. We want it to be a pressure team. We want to be a team that uses our speed to pressure … not dissimilar to Carolina. That’s where we’d like to get to eventually. I think there’s times we’ve done a really good job of it. We actually scored both goals in Carolina because our D were deeper down walls. But we’ve given up the most two-on-ones in the league by a lot, and you can’t give up two-on-ones on a night to night basis and win.
“So the decision making progress for our D men of the situations when to smell trouble and not go down walls and not just go down walls because that’s what we want to do on strong side plays, on goalie touch plays, be way more cautious and aware of whether the F3’s there or not. And then just our F3 being super automatic of coming back up the middle of the ice and not kind of… A lot of times there’s a tendency to kind of veer towards the wall and that kind of combination of the D going and the F3 going, that’s when you end up giving up those two on one.”
Chicago Blackhawks center Frank NazarSo… the Blackhawks’ lineup was…?
Here are the lines and defensive pairs we saw at Monday’s practice:
Roman Kantserov — Connor Bedard — Tyler Bertuzzi Andrew Mangiapane — Anton Frondell — Teuvo Teräväinen Oliver Moore — Frank Nazar — Ryan Donato Cole Smith — Ryan Greene — Jordan Greenway Dillon Boucher
Alex Vlasic — Ian Cole Ethan Del Mastro — Artyom Levshunov Wyatt Kaiser — Sam Rinzel Kevin Korchinski
Here’s Blashill’s rationale for not making massive changes now to his lines or systems after the extensive internal meetings over the weekend:
“I’ve lived through situations like this, and you can make things much worse by making full-scale changes where then guys go out and they don’t know what they’re doing, and it is honestly way worse.
“I had a lot of conversations with our players too, about OK, do we know what we’re doing? Is there hesitation? Number one thing on system play by far is belief in the system. As I talked to the players, there was full belief in the systems that we’re doing, and that’s the number one thing. Buying and belief to me matters the most. I didn’t get any feel of ‘why are we doing this?’ and I’ve got that in the past, you get that when things aren’t going well, and I got zero feel from that.
“If you make full-scale changes to what you do, you could walk on the ice Thursday and our guys be super hesitant and not know what they’re doing, and that’s the worst possible situation. For me, it was more looking at identifying areas, either changes in the points of emphasis or tweaks in how we do things, to make sure that we correct the areas where we’re struggling. My job is to use these three days of practice so that they can go out on Thursday and in areas where we’ve made any tweaks or or changes, they can go play free and not think about what they’re supposed to be doing. We should train them through the course of the week so they can just go do it.”
I can appreciate the Blackhawks wanting to perfect what they’re doing. Back to basics, if you will. But there comes a point where things like basic defending shouldn’t be coaching priorities in mid-November. And the same mistakes cannot continue happening.
Yes, the Blackhawks had a players only meeting in Carolina. And then the front office and coaches sang kumbaya and made s’mores over the weekend to figure out how to solve the puzzle that is the current state of affairs at 1901 W. Madison. The fact is: execution from every level of the organization needs to improve.
Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson is at general manager meetings right now. We’ll see if that creates an opportunity to change the NHL roster mix more than swapping backup goaltenders. And, when he speaks with the media on Wednesday afternoon, I’m positive there will be more questions about the issues, possible solutions and the overall trajectory of his rebuild.
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