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The Mighty Are Falling

November 14, 2017, 9:04 AM ET [9 Comments]
Jay Greenberg
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • RSSArchiveCONTACT
One night, Duncan Keith is missing the net on a 5-on-3 with a chance to get back into a game in Philadelphia and the popgun Blackhawks, 3-1 losers, are vowing to keep firing to change their shooting luck. Two days later, they rally back from a 3-1 deficit to win in overtime in Carolina and are feeling much better about their offense, just need to fix those chronic slow starts, right?

The next night, at home against the Devils, they do, jump up 4-1 before Corey Crawford suddenly turns into Steve Passmore and Chicago loses 7-5.

Here come the Hawks, the flighty Black Hawks. What in the name of Steve Dubinsky is going on here? On opening night Chicago blew out the Stanley Cup champions Penguins, 10-1, followed that up with a 5-1 pasting of a very good Blue Jackets team, then hit a stretch when the Blackhawks scored 22 goals in 12 games before busting out twice, only to collapse with a big lead the following night and fall to 8-8-2.

Who are these guys? We’ll let you know as soon as they figure it out. So acute were Chicago’s offensive woes last week that Joel Quenneville loaded up Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Patrick Sharp on one line in Philly, only to have it dominated by Jake Voracek, Sean Couturier and Claude Giroux. By the second period, Sharp had been replaced by Brandon Saad, he of the 10-game goalless slump.

Maybe you can go home again, as Saad and Sharp are trying. We’ll see, but you can move these shells around all you want and if there is no pea, who wins? Besides, it’s on defense where the Blackhawks need another set of quick hands, not behind the bench, although we all know what happens when a champion starts to fade. The coach sees the problems before he starts to get blamed for them.

Quenneville is the same coach that won three Cups in six years. This is not same team that he ran, even though the names on the marquee haven’t changed.

The Blackhawks’ depth has thinned out for more reasons than just the season-long absence of Marian Hossa. Since the 2002-07 foundation-laying drafts of Keith, Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Brent Seabrook and Crawford—the goalie came up after Cup One was in the bank–the Blackhawks have just one core player, the traded and since-returned Saad (No. 2, 2011) to show for their picks.

Still pending is the development of Nick Schmaltz (No. 1, 2014 and Ryan Hartman (No. 1, 2013. currently manning third and fourth lines, and rookie Alex Debrincat (No. 2, 2016). The tiny Debrincat already has six goals and certainly looks like a player while Hartman was an apparent healthy scratch on the weekend. Not a good sign as the time approaches for Keith, Kane and Toews to pass the torch. But to whom?

The trade of Nicklas Hjalmarsson to Arizona for Connor Murphy was an attempt to get some cap room, plus a younger version of Hjalmarsson. But a reliable soldier of all three championships is missed, while there remains inadequate talent coming into its prime.

Hey, it only took 50 years to replace Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita; two decades even to find reasonable facsimiles for Jeremy Roenick and Chris Chelios. As it has been since 1969, you have to draft really high (Kane and Toews), and get really lucky (Keith in the second round) to build a nucleus that can sustain what the Hawks have done.

Kane, 29, Toews, 29, and Keith, 34, still are good players. But they are going to need more help, particularly from a defense that, either by design or talent limitations, is not getting up in the play, the name of the game in an NHL where it is hard to make the opposition break down three-on-three. In 18 games, the Hawks D has just six goals and 41 points, grade D numbers.

Saad is a solid player and a Stanley Cup hero, but he came back at the cost of 31-goal scorer Artemi Panarin, traded largely because there wasn’t going to be cap room to sign him for the long term.

Aw, that cap, the grimmest of reapers for dynasties. The Blackhawks did what the Penguins, Kings and all the wannabe two-or-three-time champions of the Cup era have smartly done—identify their core, lock it up, and spread the rest of the remaining pocket change on the best supporting cast the budget allows.

The best way to make that work is the way the Penguins have – with Patric Hornqvist, Carl Hagelin, Justin Schultz and Brian Dumoulin making market-value $4 million and Bryan Rust and Jake Guentzel contributing big playoff goals off minimum salaries.

The Penguins have had to make tough decisions; they are defending without Chris Kunitz and Matt Cullen and we will see how that goes. But you if look at Pittsburgh’s salaries, they make relative sense, starting with cap numbers of $9.5 million for Evgeni Malkin, $8.7 million for Sidney Crosby, $7.2 for Kris Letang and $6.8 for Phil Kessel.

With Kane and Toews eating up $21 million of space under a $75 million cap—that’s more than a quarter-Chicago needs some bargains, which Saad, at $6 million is not. Seabrook makes $6.8, Keith, $5.5 and after that, the fans are looking mostly at guys around or under $1 million and, pending some surprises, getting what Stan Bowman paid for. When all this is compounded by slow starts for your stars, that’s how you are a .500 team.

You might ask: What’s the big deal, with that? Despite it all, the Blackhawks are in a virtual four-way tie for a wild card spot and we are not even at Thanksgiving yet. Crawford is an elite goalie, Kane, Toews and Keith should come on.

It was a good guess–well, at least it was our guess–that the early Chicago summer of 2015,might turn out to be a 2016 spring blessing for players who had played a lot of grueling spring hockey over the last eight years, Instead the Blackhawks were shutout twice and then dominated in the elimination game of a Nashville sweep, making it consecutive years they failed to advance a round.

If the Blackhawks get to the post-season this time, could they have a last hurrah? Conceivably yes, if they find their Guentzel, but regardless, the clock is running double time on this era.

It’s been great while it lasted, so it would be fun to see it go a little longer. We have always felt that, in the long term, dynasties drive more interest for the sport than having two-thirds of the league within three games either way of .500.

So unlike Ryan Johansson last April, we wish the Blackhawks no harm, really hate to see it end, like all good things must.
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