The Need to Knows
- The Time: 7pm PT
- The Place: Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle, Washington
- Place to Watch: ROOT Northwest, ESPN+, SportsNet+
- Place to Listen: KJR 93.3-FM
- An Opposing Viewpoint: Second City Hockey
Know Your Enemy
- The Hawks are Not Good, but that is the point. They have 19 points as a result of their 9-18-1 record, and are 3-6-1 in their last 10 games.
- It might shock you to learn but this Connor Bedard character happens to be very good. He leads the Hawks in Goals, Assists, and points with an even-split 24 points in 28 games.
- Behind Bedard is a couple of fairly strong pickups for Chicago; Jason Dickenson and Philipp Kurashev. Dickenson has 9 goals and 14 points in 28 games, and Kurashev has 6 goals and 16 points in the same amount of time.
- It is hard to think of a category of the game that the Blackhawks actually lead, but one thing that is rather odd about them is that in spite of their youthful strides, they’re actually pretty bad at the power play? They’ve got a near bottom of the league 10.0% success rate on the man advantage.
- Of course, part of the issue they’ve run into is that they are beat to s#!t right now. They got 5 guys on the mend, three are on out-and-out injured reserve; including Taylor Hall and Andreas Athanasiou, Kevin Korchinski is just out, and Seth Jones is day to day. Whatever version of the Blackhawks they were planning on running is not the one we’re looking at.
- Their goaltending has been…uh….suspect over these last few games. However, it appears Petr Mrazek has emerged as something resembling a starter, having started 16 games and posted a .909 Save-%.
Game Notes
The ‘Hawks are coming into this game with a 2-game losing streak, neither of them are and a kind of a derailing of a season that is already being used as valuable time to get this Bedard character acclimated to the NHL. That part is happening, but they’re so thin that aside from the wunderkind, what you’re looking at is more like a big-time version of the Rockford IceHogs than a competing team.
Should that set you at ease? Oh my, no. This is the Seattle Kraken, after all. This team never does anything easy or normal if it can help it.
Hot off their shutout win over the Panthers, the Kraken still need to figure out what the best version of themselves are, or if they even want to be that. Thanks to the Pacific still being an absolute tirefire most nights outside of the top 3, they aren’t that far out from potentially finding themselves in a playoff spot, especially with Arizona going into a mystifying holding pattern…but is that really what they need? Frankly, I think trying to get back a little of what made them so fun to watch last year would be in their best interest, and it starts with every last forward attacking these hapless Hawks and attacking them hard; they’re giving up an absolute boatload of shots this year, and getting on the board and going back for more would go a long way towards getting their winning ways back into their game.
Besides, after this…it’s nearly all pacific division foes until the Winter Classic, with some Dallas and a surprise Philadelphia game thrown in for flavor. There are no easy points won after this.
So they should move heaven and earth to win the one that does.
LETS GO KRAKEN
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