So, after further wresting and techno-wrangling of my Kodi app on my new Amazon FireStick, I sat and enjoyed several minutes of last night’s Eastern Conference Final on a nice HD stream of the CBC broadcast.
I honestly have not watched a lot of hockey lately, other than a Blues/Stars game several days ago.
What really struck me was the speed of the game between the Penguins and the Lightning. Which brought two things to mind. First, it reminded me of last year’s Stanley Cup Final—that level of intensity and speed. Second, I also felt that just 11 months or so later, this year’s Blackhawks club could not have kept pace in last night’s game.
Typically, when you get a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious, you should not dismiss it.
So while we Hawk fans try to deconstruct what was wrong with the Hawks this past year (bad 5-on-5, uncharacteristically poor production from the Toews line, weak defensive numbers by Chicago standards—and everyone has their favorite whipping boy, for sure), maybe a bigger catch-all issue was a serious loss of speed up and down the roster and all over the ice.
Consider this:
LOST
Brandon Saad
Patrick Sharp
Johnny Oduya
Antoine Vermette
ADDED
Artem Anisimov
Artemi Panarin
Trevor Daley
Ryan Garbutt
Viktor Svedberg/Erik Gustafsson
On paper, in terms of speed, it’s not a terrible trade-off.
But here’s the problem. Daley turned into Rob Scuderi and later the Ghost of what was once Christian Ehrhoff.
And Garbutt turned into the even faster Jiri Sekac, who also immediately got in to the Quenneville doghouse like Daley and Garbutt did earlier in the year— hardly ever played, got cut, and then later sort of turned into Richard Panik.
The larger issues are these.
Oduya’s speed was never replaced on the back-end, and more specifically in terms of the top 4 defense that plays 25-30 minutes a night. But you have to think that’s what Stan Bowman had in mind when he dealt for Daley. And the glacial Michal Rozsival and David Rundblad got some fairly serious minutes in the playoffs.
Saad’s speed was never replaced at LW on the Toews line. You can even argue that while Panik sort of eventually replaced Sharp as a LW who was played all over the top 9, there was even a slight speed loss there. Maybe.
Those are a couple of critical positions where speed—like on the receiving end of the stretch pass that opens up so many more opportunities for the Hawks and slows other teams down, which Saad and Sharp were so good at, or pinching from the blueline and creating opportunities down low, yet having the speed to get back and defend, which Oduya became very good at in Chicago, not unlike Bryan Campbell and, yes, Trevor Daley—mattered for the Hawks until this past summer.
Yes, we can point to NHL officiating reverting to almost a pre-2005 mentality of allowing a lot of clutching and grabbing again. But lo and behold, look at the four teams left in the playoffs. Three of them—St. Louis, and especially Pittsburgh and Tampa— are speed teams. The Ducks and Kings and Rangers are playing golf.
Regardless, the Hawk system at both ends of the ice is predicated on mobility and speed. Thinking fast and playing fast. That doesn’t preclude physical play, and it shouldn’t, and the Hawks at their best have been a mix of great speed AND physicality.
But it also seems that the Hawks reached a tipping point at some point in the season, possibly when Daley was really struggling and couldn’t get more than ten minutes of TOI, then he and Garbutt were traded, possibly because the core was maybe playing a quarter step slow due to cumulative fatigue. Possibly because Svedberg and Gustafsson were thinking a step slow (and Svedberg is just . . . slow). Possibly because Trevor van Riemsdyk in Oduya’s role is slower than his predecessor.
Maybe all those things together.
There is some good news here. The Hawks still boast a lot of speed up and down the lineup, even “that old washed up plug horse” Marian Hossa can still blaze past a lot of guys 15 year his junior—then there’s Duncan Keith, Patrick Kane, Panik, Panarin, Marcus Kruger, Jonathan Toews can still reach warp speed with the puck on his blade at times.
But the Hawks also seem to need an injection of speed and skill (not to mention experience) on defense and at left wing. And hopefully, with a longer summer of rest, they come back capable of attaining the pace they had in many successful seasons since 2009.
Speed kills—if you have it and if you don’t—especially if you play the system the Chicago Blackhawks do.
I’ll have more as I hear it.
JJ
Chicago Blackhawks Blogger • 
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