SAN JOSE, Calif. — For a week now, Jeremy Colliton has been touting the Blackhawks’ two losses against Colorado and Dallas — a pair of four-point swings that severely dampened the excitement around the team of late — as something of a positive.
They played well, he said. They deserved better, he said. That’s the model, he said.
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“Maybe we didn’t deserve four (points),” he said. “But we certainly didn’t deserve zero. And we’ve got to find that level more consistently. … Then we’re going to get our points.”
Well, Duncan Keith isn’t buying it.
“I thought we played just OK in those games,” he said with a shrug following Saturday’s demoralizing defeat in Los Angeles. “I thought we worked hard, but we still made a lot of mistakes. I’m not trying to be negative, that’s just my opinion. … I certainly don’t think we’re in a position where we can’t respect our opponents. If anything, they should not be having respect for us, the way we’ve been playing.”
That’s some blunt honesty from one of the bluntest people in the Blackhawks organization. And he’s not being negative. He’s being honest. He’s being realistic. It’s time the rest of us do that, too.
Playoff teams don’t look at near-misses against mediocre teams as the bar. Playoff teams don’t need to score four or five goals to win every night. Playoff teams don’t give up seven goals to the Ottawa Senators. Playoff teams don’t blow a three-goal, third-period lead against the lowly Red Wings and have to escape in overtime. Playoff teams don’t give up nine goals against the Ducks and Kings, the two worst offenses in the league.
It’s been 23 years since a team with a goal-differential in the same neighborhood as the Blackhawks’ minus-30 has reached the playoffs (the 1995-96 Blues were minus-29). Most years, no team with a negative goal-differential makes it. And for all intents and purposes, Sunday’s 5-2 loss in San Jose — a game effort against a very good team — sealed their fate. To the draft lottery, they go.
Yes, the Blackhawks were in a playoff spot ever so briefly last week. But no, they were never a playoff-caliber team. These last couple of months have been refreshing and invigorating and have genuinely rekindled hope for the near future. But this season? The Blackhawks are who we thought they were — a flawed team with a handful of superb high-end scorers and a ragged defense, a team with holes to fill, an inexperienced team with an inexperienced coaching staff still finding its way.
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We all could sense it, even during the seven-game win streak that improbably launched the left-for-dead Blackhawks into the playoff conversation. Oh, it was fun to watch meaningful hockey games at the United Center again, fun to dream about playoff hockey returning to Chicago a year or two ahead of schedule, but the signs were all there — the 40 shots-against per night, the Benny Hill escapades in their own end, the fact that Patrick Kane had to average more than two points per game for the Blackhawks to squeak out victories against lousy teams.
Less than a week before that run, the Blackhawks lost to Eastern Conference dregs in New Jersey and New York. After a wild 8-5 win over Washington and an impressive 3-2 shootout win over the Islanders, the Blackhawks came out of the break and won five more in a row — none of them against contenders. The complete collapse of Western (Conference) civilization in early February put them in a playoff spot with a 26-26-9 record, but as the other teams in the race course-corrected with win streaks, so have the Blackhawks by losing four of five.
So we’re back to where we were a month or two ago, when Kane was talking about needing “a couple” of 10-game win streaks to have a chance, to needing a miracle.
“I think we’re still in this thing,” Dylan Strome said after the San Jose loss. “We proved we can win seven in a row pretty quickly there. We did it. We’re never out of it.”
“We’ve gone on a streak before, so you definitely can’t count it out,” Corey Crawford said. “The teams ahead of us, they were kind of struggling for a bit and they’ve picked it up. So for us, it’s just play our game and not worry about what’s coming. Just focus on each game, and we definitely have the team to get in.”
Of course, they’re going to say that. And hell, they may very well believe it. It’s that unerring self-belief and faith in his teammates that has helped Crawford and the rest of the remaining core reach the mountaintop multiple times before. But any unbiased observer can see they don’t have the team to get in. Not yet, at least.
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And that’s the key takeaway here. Not yet. Just because the playoffs were always a pipe dream, doesn’t mean the Blackhawks didn’t take meaningful strides this season. The acquisition of Strome has transformed the top six. The soaring confidence of Erik Gustafsson has transformed the power play. The singular brilliance of Kane and the scoring surge of Jonathan Toews have quieted talks of a long-term tear-down and changed the plan to a one- or two-year retooling. The meteoric rise (even with the inexplicable, indefensible late-season demotion) of Henri Jokiharju gives hope for the top four beyond Keith and Brent Seabrook. The emergence of Collin Delia has cleared a path forward beyond Crawford. The copious amount of cap space Stan Bowman has to work with this summer should flesh out the top nine and maybe create some competition for the next generation of defensemen in the system.
And a top-five draft pick is still very much possible. No, the Blackhawks won’t tank. For all of this team’s flaws, character isn’t one of them. They fought back in the darkest days of November and December every time they fell behind 2-0 or 3-0 early. And they fought back from dead last in the league to a playoff spot, ever so briefly. But a final week of Jets, Blues, Stars and Predators could “help” them improve their chances to draft Jack Hughes or Kaapo Kakko.
That’s probably the ideal situation now. The Blackhawks got their taste of intensity, of meaningful hockey games. Some of the younger guys now know how it feels to pick up two truly huge points, and how it feels to lose two truly huge points. That’s not a small thing, and it’ll simply whet their appetites going forward. But a transcendent young difference-maker in the draft sure wouldn’t hurt, either. That’s partly how the Blackhawks got to the top to begin with, after all.
In the meantime, for this final month of the season, the Blackhawks will keep battling. The veterans will play for pride, the free-agents-to-be will play for contracts, and the kids will play for jobs next season. And yes, they’ll hold out hope that another miracle can happen.
“There’s still games left, but it’s definitely frustrating,” Keith said in LA. “Time is ticking here.”
The hard truth is, it’s already run out.
(Top photo: Brandon Magnus / NHLI via Getty Images)