NEWSLETTER
We officially begin the second half of the season today for the Chicago Blackhawks. One of the few teams in the NHL to reach the mid-way point of the season on time. They’ll take on the Florida Panthers for the first time since the January 17th and 19th meetings back in the third and fourth games of the season. Like they did against the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Blackhawks will hope to showcase just how much they have grown since their last meetings against the Panthers, a 5-2 loss and a 5-4 loss in overtime.
• Eight of the next ten games will be against the team ahead of the Blackhawks in the Central Division standings, playing the Panthers four times, the Lightning twice, and the Carolina Hurricanes twice to end the month of March and begin the April portion of the schedule. The Blackhawks are a combined 2-5-3 against those three teams this season with a minus-15 goal differential in those games.
• If the Blackhawks are going to be taken seriously as a team that can make the playoffs and make some noise beyond May 10th, they’ll need to improve on one major area of concern: their 5-on-5 even strength play. Having a top-three powerplay in the league is fantastic (you need to be a threat to your opponents when they make mistakes), but it can’t be all you rely upon to generate offense and give you a chance to win. The good teams in this league will tighten their games late in the season and into the playoffs and opportunities on the powerplay will dwindle.
• At 5-on-5, the Blackhawks are one of the worst teams in the NHL.
⇒ Average 5v5 TOI/Game: 49:04 (6th)
⇒ Chances For%: 46.62 (30th)
⇒ Shots For%: 46.23 (30th)
⇒ Goals For%: 46.15 (23rd)
⇒ Scoring Chances For%: 46.64 (25th)
⇒ High-Danger Chances For%: 44.19 (29th)
⇒ Shooting%: 7.52 (25th)
⇒ Save%: .924 (9th)
⇒ PDO: 1.000 (18th)
• Chicago’s saving grace is their goaltending. Kevin Lankinen and Malcolm Subban have pretty regularly bailed out the Blackhawks when they haven’t been playing up to a playoff-caliber level. At the half-way point of the season, there’s not much that you can hope to drastically change about a team. The Blackhawks are a poor 5-on-5 team, but they’ll have to find ways to improve if this whole “missing out on a potentially high lottery draft pick” thing is going to be worth while.
• Given the way they have played through 28 games, and the way the bottom four teams in the Central Division have played this season, the Blackhawks have a decent cushion in the Divisional standings in fourth-place. They could potentially “lock-up” a playoff spot with a few more wins.
We are half-way through the 2021 #NHL season, 28 games played for the #Blackhawks.
(14-9-5, 33 pts, 4th in the Central)
Is this a playoff team?— Mario Tirabassi (@Mario_Tirabassi) March 12, 2021
• Speaking of Lankinen, his bid for the Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year looks to be losing its shine. He’s no longer the leading rookie goaltender in the NHL, and also Kirill Kaprizov is just running away with it at this point.
Goes without saying, but Kirill Kaprizov is the real deal.
That's career @Enterprise hat trick No. 1! pic.twitter.com/ieqic2ZG80
— NHL (@NHL) March 13, 2021
• Lankinen, Pius Suter, and Philipp Kurashev made good runs early this season, but they’re not catching Kaprizov now.
• A note about tonight’s Blackhawks-Panthers game: Patrick Kane and Keith Yandle are the two most recent players to reach 1,000 NHL games played (Yandle ahead of Kane). They became the 52nd and 53rd U.S.-born players to do so in league history.
• Kane leads the Blackhawks in points this season with 40. Alex DeBrincat is second on the team with 29, and Dominik Kubalík is behind them with 21 points. They are also the top three goal scorers on the team, with DeBrincat leading the way with 15 goals this season, and all three are in the top-five of even-strength points for the Blackhawks this season along with Pius Suter and Mattias Janmark.
• Prior to the season, we talked about how Kane, DeBrincat, and Kubalík were going to need to be the power players for the Blackhawks if they were going to have any success this season with the losses of Alex Nylander, Kirby Dach, and Jonathan Toews. The three have stepped up mightily with Kane playing at a career-best pace and DeBrincat having a bounce-back season and scoring at a 51-goal pace over an 82-game season. Kubalík is also showing that his rookie season last year was no fluke. Keep this up, paired with the rookies continuing to pull their own weight and the looming return of Kirby Dach to the lineup and the Blackhawks might have something brewing come late-April and May.
• Have yourselves a Saturday, folks!
