The Blackhawks had a full week of practices to fix some of the issues that had been plaguing them before hosting the Montreal Canadiens on Friday night. A Canadiens team that, by the way, just placed their captain on IR.
After 60 minutes, the Habs left the United Center with a 4-1 victory. The Chicago Blackhawks fell to 3-7-0 on the season. Fans booed them during the game. The players in the room weren’t happy. The vibes weren’t great.
So how do the Blackhawks attempt to course correct before the season is too far gone to start shifting course back towards competitive play?
Ian Cole played his 1,000th career regular season game on Friday night. He is a Stanley Cup champion, and has played on some very good teams. He’s seen a lot in the league. He’s also never pulled any punches or minced any words when I’ve spoken with him. So, after the loss, I went directly to him to ask what needs to happen.
“I don’t know if it’s one thing,” Cole said on Friday night. “A lot of things are culminating together and not what we would view as our best efforts. So we need to have some conversations tomorrow and figure out how we can be better because clearly it’s not good enough. We start the game well, come out, looking good, flying, skating fast, that’s great. …
“We like to think of ourselves as a fast skilled team and that’s all well and good, but we need to win battles. Hockey’s about winning puck battles. It’s winning the puck. It’s about keeping the puck. We’ve got to do a much better job of that for sure. All of us, all the way around. But we can play better. We know that. We’ve shown that. We just need to do it more consistently. …
“This is a hockey game and we’re professionals. We need to bring it for 60 minutes. Ultimately it wasn’t good enough, clearly. So we need to take some hard looks in the mirror and make some very conscious decisions to figure out how we need to be better as a collective and certainly individually.”
Blackhawks “Not Far Off”
Blackhawks head coach Jeff Blashill doesn’t like frustration, but he sounded like he was fighting it after the game. He still tried to find the rainbow in the midst of the tornado, though.
“We’re not far off from playing the way we want to play at all,” Blashill said after the game. “I think we’ve been very close to the way we want to play. It’ll be a broken record till we fix it. We have to continue in our maturity and not shoot ourselves in the foot. …
“We got the start we wanted to for sure. … If you judge the game by kind of how it went, we shot ourselves in the foot with the first goal against, shot ourselves in the foot on the short-handed goal again. So that’s two shoot yourselves in the foot. They kind of get a goal on a seeing eyed kind of shot in the third and we didn’t give up much and we created more than they did. That’s the reality of the game, you know what I mean? The reality of the game is they outscored us, that’s a fact. And we out-chanced them, that’s a fact. And by enough margin that we should be in position to win the game, we’re not scoring at all right now, so we have no room for error.
“I still like our team a lot. We haven’t had a full group yet, so I look forward to that day when we have our full group. We’re not far off, but we’re far off. We’re far — we’re three and seven, so that’s way far off in what we want to be. I don’t think we’re far off from it clicking and turning the other way, but we got to make it happen. And if we feel sorry for ourselves right now and get frustrated, then it’ll spiral. If we dig in and just worry about each individual player getting better, then we’ll start to turn the tide.”
Note: Blashill repeatedly said that the Blackhawks out-chanced the Canadiens. He must have been referring to their internal analytics. Natural Stat Trick has the Canadiens owning a 27-23 scoring chance advantage and 13-6 advantage in high danger chances.
Cole was a lot more direct with his comments than his head coach, and the veteran defenseman has been blunt all season. He’s played 1,000 games in the NHL because he’s been accountable for his play — to his teammates, his coaches, the media and himself.
Tonight wasn’t the first time he talked about taking ownership of a role and really earning ice time. If the Blackhawks want to get out of the cellar, they need to act on Cole’s words.
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