Waaay Late on This: Hawks 3, Penguins 1 But We Won't Talk About That (much)

Yeah, so The Hawks dominated a pretty tired-looking Penguins squad, Artemi Panarin continues to deal a hot hand and more precious ground is made up on Dallas.  Despite it really being a 2-1 game with a gimme, The Hawks rarely seemed troubled in this one, although those are occasionally the types of games that don't end well, so let's take the two and move on.
Once again, though, it was essentially a three line effort, with the Rasmussen line getting only a handful of shifts.  More on this in a bit.

The chatter today largely revolved around a player yet to arrive with the team and a player yet to be obtained at all.  First, Richard Panik's Hawks debut has been delayed because of Visa issues.  The word is, though, that when he arrives he'll get a look alongside Toews and Hossa.  I'm not sure what to think about that, as it seems like a pretty high pressure introduction to the squad, one in which he just as likely to fail and, well, we know how that goes.  I guess we can all just hope for the best but it seems a longshot that Panik will make the leap from the minors to Toews' combo entirely smoothly.

The other story that keeps popping up is The Hawks making a deal for Tampa's Jonathan Drouin,  I resist this, first, because the price will be too high; if Tampa were prepared to accept any old thing for Drouin that deal would have done a month ago.  Sideways from there, if Drouin were to fail to make a near-immediate impact we end up with another Rundblad situation, in which the GM coughed up who-knows-what in exchange for a guy that Quenneville won't use.  The Hawks have to pass on this at least until the Panik experiment runs its course.