With only a few small exceptions, that was pretty much true. Of course it helped that they were facing the not-ready-for-prime-time Sabres who, despite half of their lineup consisting of really very unexceptional players, find themselves within spitting distance of the last Wildcard spot in The East. The Sabres shouldn't be as bad as they are, as they possess a handful of above-average NHLers in Okposo, Reinhart, O'Rielly and Evander Kane, when he feels like it, as well as the Truly Special Jack Eichel, but the supporting cast is deplorable, consisting of a few used-up veterans and a rotating cast of AHL-quality players. Their defense is possibly worse, the highlight there being Rasmus Ristolainen who serves as an outstanding power play QB....but little else. Bogosian and Franson are average, at best and, beyond them, the abyss. The NBC broadcast team (who the hell was the colour man, anyway, and did he win his job in a raffle?) plumped up Robin Lehner rather comprehensively, only for the young Swedish netminder to cough up a furball in this one. Anyway, it's not a complete group, by any means, and I'll get back to some of that in a bit.
As for The Hawks, it was a good effort, made to look even better by their opponents, in which I found only a few faults:
- The Toews and Anisimov lines went entire shifts in the first half of the game in which they could not break out of their own zone. I'm putting this down to their timing still coming back to them after their week off, as well as the fact that The Sabres pitched their two top lines against their Hawks counterparts for much of the game. On the surface this seems incredibly foolhardy, particularly at home with the last change but, just as it was for Colorado a few weeks ago, that's the best plan The Sabres have right now. While that was happening The Hawks' bottom-six were having their way with The Sabres bottom-six and, if that's the way it was gonna be, imagine what a nightmare it would have been if those lines were deployed against The Hawks top-six? Oh, wait - they were, in the third period, and it was a shit-show. What's more is, even after getting their top two lines out there vs.The Hawks third and fourth units....they still didn't manage to generate a ton of chances, possibly due to being worn out from chasing Panarin & Kane around for the first 40 minutes, as well as having endured a busy couple of weeks with nine games in the last fourteen days.
- Panarin was again not great. Better, but still not firing on all cylinders.
- Apart from a handful of botched assignments The Hawks D played a fine game, EXCEPT for one shift in the first period in which 57-Varieties-of-Bad insisted on dispatching the puck to teammates who were going the wrong way, three feet away from him, about to be struck by a Sabres player, etc. Sometimes I just wonder what the hell goes on in his head.
Tough one tonight, as no Hawks player really ran away with the thing. Toews had some inspired shifts but had only a junk goal to show for it. Ditto for Hossa and, despite the result, Darling wasn't really tested much at all after the first period. So for this one, The Surly Swede "smiles" upon hometown boy Patrick Kane who, after a slow start to the game, went a bit nuts on the aforementioned Sabres bottom-six.
Anyway, things get real again on Tuesday vs. The Wild. Hopefully The Hawks will have worked out all the kinks from the week off and be able to make the most of this four-point game.
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