NHL
The Blackhawks played a solid road game against the two-time Stanley Cup finalists on Saturday. Perry Nelson / Imagn Images
EDMONTON — Kris Knoblauch and the Oilers knew the basics, of course. They knew that Connor Bedard has one hell of a shot, that Frank Nazar is dangerous in transition, that Teuvo Teräväinen is probably going to pass rather than shoot, that Artyom Levshunov is liable to do just about anything out there. They knew that the Blackhawks try to overload in one quadrant of the defensive zone, to hound the puck carrier and make centering passes difficult.
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But an NHL pre-scout typically goes a whole lot deeper than that. And so far this season, the Blackhawks are a difficult team to prepare for. For one, they have a new coach, Jeff Blashill, who is tweaking and honing and adding to his team’s systems knowledge on a literal daily basis. For another, a good chunk of their most important players are still new to this league, without a lengthy track record or a library of video to pore over. And because of those two things, they’re also wildly inconsistent from game to game.
When you’re playing the Blackhawks, you never quite know what you’re going to get. Not yet, at least.
“For example, Tampa Bay, the coach (Jon Cooper) has been there for a long time, the majority of the main players have been there,” Knoblauch said before Saturday night’s 3-2 overtime victory over the Blackhawks. “You have a pretty good idea of what their team is going to be like and what each player’s going to provide. Anytime there’s been a lot of turnover with coaching staff, players, then it makes it a little more difficult. Game to game, it fluctuates. And they’re also probably trying to find their identity.”
That last part is particularly interesting. Who are these Blackhawks exactly? What is their identity? More importantly, what will their identity be when all the pieces are in place, including the likes of Anton Frondell, Roman Kantserov, Sacha Boisvert, Nick Lardis and Oliver Moore?
Depends on who you ask.
For Bedard, the Blackhawks’ identity is speed.
“Our pace of play is big,” he said. “We’re fast and we have talent in here. We talk about it a lot, just how fast our team is. We’ve got a lot of guys that can really fly, and that makes teams sit back a bit. We’ve still got to have good structure, and we don’t need to force offense. But when we’re on pucks and moving fast, that’s when we’re playing our best.”
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For Alex Vlasic, the Blackhawks’ identity is defense. There’s nothing Vlasic would love more than to be the next Los Angeles Kings, suffocating teams and limiting chances.
“We obviously have a lot of young skill,” Vlasic said. “And that’s definitely something that helps in the long run. But for now, everybody’s focused on just being a team that’s detailed and hard to play against. We want to be a team that teams can’t really get too many chances against.”
For Blashill, the Blackhawks’ identity is being really, really annoying.
“Take away every inch of ice, make the opponent earn every inch,” he said. “Make them feel like there’s no space. We’ve got a really good-skating forward group, we’ve got really long good-skating defensemen. So when we can do that — when we have done that — we’ve been a good team this year.”
Of course, the key is to meld all three of those identities into one, a hockey Voltron of utter dominance.
The speed? It makes getting transition offense that much tougher. The defensive structure? It triggers the transition offense the other way. The pestering style? It wears down opponents and goads them into taking foolish penalties.
“It’d be awesome to be a team like L.A., that shuts you down,” Vlasic said. “And to have that skill up front, it’s easy to model against some of the better teams in the league. But if you look at Florida, if you look at Edmonton, if you look at Vegas, they kind of have it all. They’re able to shut down other teams but also produce quite a bit of offense.”
This has been general manager Kyle Davidson’s entire modus operandi when it comes to drafting. He’s been seeking out a whole bunch of Nazars — players who are fast, who are relentless, who are tenacious and never seem to let up. Blashill wants the Blackhawks to be a fast-pressure team at both ends of the rink, one that attacks vertically but never cheats for offense. He said that any successful team has to have “great two-way players,” and that’s what he’s trying to mold the younger Blackhawks into.
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There was plenty of that on Saturday night, as the Blackhawks played a solid road game against the two-time Stanley Cup finalists. Bedard once again was buzzing all night — he set up a Tyler Bertuzzi goal in the second period, giving him four goals and four assists in his last four games — and Ryan Greene outworked the Oilers below the goal line to set up an Artyom Levshunov shot and a rebound which André Burakovsky buried.
It was a good point against a good team. But learning to escape a game like this with two points instead of one is all part of the process.
“It’s tough, we’ve been in this position a lot,” Greene said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to win games like this. I think it’s a good thing that we’ve been tight with some of the top teams in the league, but obviously we’ve got to find a way to get it done.”
Greene and the other younger players are still settling into roles as more prospects become pros — Vlasic, for example, was running the power play less than a year ago; now he’s more of a defensive specialist. That’ll happen to other players, too, as the complexion of the roster changes, and that’ll lead to more tweaks and more mentality shifts. It could be another year or two before we truly know what Blashill’s Blackhawks look like, until we really know what their identity is.
But the early returns are promising.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to what we think works best for this team,” Vlasic said. “We want to be somewhere in the middle, a little of everything.”
1. It was a unique atmosphere at Rogers Place, as the game ran concurrently with Game 7 of the World Series, which transfixed and unified seemingly all of Canada. The arena game-ops crew even played the game live on the scoreboard during the first two periods — full screen during breaks in the action — making for some wild mood swings. The crowd roared when the Blue Jays got a big hit or a big out, and even booed when the baseball game was minimized into a smaller window when the puck was dropped.
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Blashill said he even caught himself watching the game a bit, calling a second-period roar in particular “a weird, interesting moment.”
“I didn’t really watch it, per se,” Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight said, “but I remember there was one point in the second period when it must’ve been on the Jumbotron, because there was a play, it was around the net, and everyone was quiet. All of a sudden, everyone started freaking out. I almost jumped a little bit. I was like, ‘What the f— is going on?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, the World Series.’”
Rogers Place stopped showing the game during the third period, as the Dodgers went on to win. Blashill said the Blackhawks weren’t the ones who complained.
“It’s been neat being up here, just from the aspect that it’s one country’s team, and you can tell that and you can get that vibe,” Blashill said.
2. Blashill didn’t hesitate to go right back to Knight after the goalie’s first poor performance of the season Thursday night in Winnipeg. Knight rewarded him with an excellent 27-save effort, including 13 first-period stops. He turned aside a Vasily Podkolzin penalty shot in the first period, and even before Evan Bouchard beat him for the game-winner in overtime, he made a spectacular sprawling save on a two-on-one that led to the Bouchard rebound.
Knight shrugged off the Jets game and said it wasn’t critical for his mentality to get right back in net.
“It doesn’t really matter to me, to be honest,” he said. “You just go about your day, whatever it is, good or bad. That’s how I approach it, at least.”
3. Levshunov had been on the ice for 1 minute, 44 seconds — a lifetime in three-on-three when you don’t have the puck — when Bouchard scored the winner. The 20-year-old defenseman collapsed to the ice after the puck went in. Going up against the trio of Bouchard, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl is tough enough when you’re fresh.
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“It certainly wasn’t his fault, he was out there forever, you’re going to get tired,” Blashill said. “Another guy (Ryan Donato) got beat a little bit, so now it’s like a two-on-one. That’s what happens in overtime and obviously those guys are elite overtime players. We couldn’t get our guys back on the ice and so it’s just the way it goes.”
4. Ilya Mikheyev returned after missing two games with an upper-body injury. With Jason Dickinson missing his fourth game of the season, Mikheyev — perhaps Chicago’s best two-way forward — was a crucial addition. He got a shorthanded breakaway in the opening minute of the third period, but was denied by Stuart Skinner.
“He’s a winning hockey player, for sure,” Blashill said. “And he’s important to our team, especially when you have a really young team. He’s a guy that does an excellent job of playing a two-way game. Obviously, he’s bene a really good penalty-killer for us. He’s really good in his own end. He just wins tons of pucks and he’s an important piece for us.”
5. It’s probably only a matter of time before Bedard commercials are as ubiquitous on Chicago television as the “Drive what Kane and Toews drive” ads were for so many years. But for now, Bedard’s profile in the States is still pretty low. Not so in Canada, as the Blackhawks star pops up in commercials pretty frequently — including a CIBC ad with none other than Connor McDavid, which seems to be running on a loop north of the border.
“It’s kind of nice, most of my stuff’s Canadian, so I don’t have to watch it all the time,” Bedard said with a chuckle. “We did some of those in the summer. It’s fun, it uses a different skill set. It was good.”
Bedard is getting used to being in such company, whether it’s McDavid or his childhood idol, Sidney Crosby. Between camps and commercials and league and Team Canada events, he’s gotten to know just about everybody at least a little bit. If he ever had any awe when rubbing elbows with hockey’s elite, it’s long gone by now.
“I don’t think I was ever really like that, to be honest,” he said. “Everyone’s a human being. They just happen to be very good at hockey. That’s always how I’ve looked at it. Everyone in the league is still a normal person. You get more comfortable with everything throughout (the years), but it’s good to spend some time with those guys.”
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Mark Lazerus is a senior NHL writer for The Athletic based out of Chicago. He has covered the Blackhawks and the league at large for 13 seasons for The Athletic and the Chicago Sun-Times. He has been named one of the top three columnists in the country twice in the past three years by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkLazerus
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