Much was said about The Wild having caught and passed The Hawks in the divisional standings, as well as their eight-game winning streak vs, Chicago so, yeah, on the surface it could appear like a must-win situation. The truth of the matter, I believe, is that having failed this test will have greater impact than a Wild win would have had on either team.
Hawks lose: it's another midwinter game where they didn't give enough of a shit. Business as usual, really.
Wild lose: their eight game streak of dominance ends and, with playoffs only two months away, The Wild receive a reminder that, when it really matters, The Hawks have their number.
Anyway, here are The Bits.
The Hawks had a little trouble with the officiating tonight. It's not on purpose, of course, and it's just going to happen, sometimes, but they could not get a break from those guys until the final moments. Parise's goal...I don't know. I understand the explanation in relation to how the rules on goal reviews work, but come on - they peered at this play for nine minutes and still declare it "inconclusive"? I wish they would just have the stones to make a decision and not have this "inconclusive" option. Or, better yet, trust the on-ice officials to make the call and stand by it. It was good enough for the first 90 years of the league, after all.
Additionlly, the call on Rasmussen was soft, as was the lack of a call when Staal fouled Hjalmarsson just prior to Haula's goal (without mentioning Keith and Anisimov making a mess of their coverage). Only the call on Suter in OT went The Hawks' way, and they probably wouldn't have made that call had Suter not gone overboard with his molestation of Hossa, 'cos you know the officials really aren't too keen on calling penalties during the bonus round.
I complained about Schmaltz's positioning in the last game but, tonight, if only just for an instant, he was exactly where he needed to be. It's possible that Kempny's deep pinch had some Wild players thinking that he was one of the forwards, 'cos there were no green sweaters anywhere near Nicky-Boy while he slipped downrange to redirect Toews' pass.
Coach Q pretty much rolled four lines when he didn't have a spot wasted by Tootoo, so no line juggling to worry about. It helped, also, that The Hawks didn't take many penalties and therefore did not upset the line rotation much at all.
That said, Hinostroza wasn't great. His pass to set up the first goal was excellent but, apart from that, he played like he always seems to after he's been a healthy scratch - frantically and desperately - which is usually not productive.
Kempny was his usual mixed bag of very good with a dash or two of WTF? Still a better choice than Forsling at this time, though.
Anisimov struggled, gacking passes, turning the wrong way at the wrong time and seemed to have the puck in his feet a lot. He posted 34% Corsi at ES which is about how it looked, but what's weird is that Kane and Panarin had 53% and 62% Corsi, respectively. They couldn't have been playing apart from Anisimov that much, to end up with a 20-30% spread, could they? I would gladly inspect the shift chart to confirm on deny this but NHL.com is still a piece of crap. He seemed to be up against Koivu a lot of the time but NHL.com is still a piece of crap.
At the end of it, The Hawks played alright - not perfect by any means, and they got slapped around a bit in the possession game, but they had roughly the same number of quality chances that The Wild did. Similarly, the best Hawk tonight didn't have a perfect game either, sometimes not quite having the hands to finish what he started, but he never stopped digging, never stopped trying. Tonight, Stormare's steely glare falls upon Johnny Toews.
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