The Blackhawks basically blitzkrieged a short-handed Avalanche club (a .500 or sub-.500 club, depending on how you look at records—without one of their best defensemen) last night, 6-3.
It was certainly entertaining from the standpoint of yet another sellout crowd. But, regardless of the quality of the opposition, the Hawks’ recent improvement is being proven more and more valid with each win.
And, more importantly, even if the Hawks have been feasting on less than stellar NHL teams of late, players like Philip Danault and Erik Gustafsson are gaining incredibly valuable experience and confidence that will pay dividends down the line. And this in turn should help the Hawks as they enter in a much tougher stretch of games, starting tomorrow night:
Nashville (home) Montreal (away) Toronto (away) Montreal (home) Nashville (away) Tampa Bay (away) Florida (away) St. Louis (home)
At least 7 of these 8 contests are against likely playoff teams. So if you want a good metric for where the Hawks are as a playoff club, this is likely it.
Things to look for:
Jonathan Toews’ line broke through for 7 points last night. Is this a blip, or is this line beginning to finally gel with Swiss Army Knife Andrew Shaw at LW?
The minutes allocated to the defense show a lot of balance and confidence on the part of the coaching staff in all three pairings. But, there’s a big dropoff from Michal Rozsival to Rob Scuderi (in my opinion at least), and how many of the next several games can Rozsival play?
Against deeper teams, how well will newcomers like Danault and Gustafsson fare against tougher matchups?
The Hawks have improved their once-dreadful 5-on-5 numbers (now, 71GF/74GA for the season) fairly dramatically over the last handful of games. Will that continue? Because again, the Hawks have fattened their record somewhat with dominance in 3-on-3 OT, which will not help them come playoff time.
I’ll be back with a Nashville preview tomorrow.
JJ