The Hawks should be embarrassed, yet they don't give any indication of that when they're on the ice, 'cos they keep making the same damn, preventable errors, making things ridiculously easy for their opponents.
Pick Up A Guy, Any Guy: Once again, the forwards were situationally oblivious, unaware of what's happening around them. Watch Eakin's goal - Toews makes a failed attempt to check Pacioretty, which is fair enough, but Saad and Kane are just coasting into the zone, never bothering to cover anyone. Again. By the time Eakin made his move and scored Kane was, for some reason, already heading back towards the Vegas end. WTF?
Take a Second, Make The Pass Stick: The Hawks have been way too impatient with their passes, just getting the damn thing off their sticks as quickly as they can. At the start of the second period The Hawks "controlled" the puck for the first four minutes yet only entered the VGK zone briefly, because their passes were flat-out bad and those four minutes were largely spent recovering the puck, regrouping and starting again.
The players claim to be dissatisfied with their performance and the results of same, yet I see zero effort to improve matters. Just a lot of talk, so far.
New Guys: Hardly noticed Perlini, seems quick if haphazard. Strome picked up 1G 1A in his debut and had a couple of good looks that didn't go. First impression is that he's got the speed, some moves and a very good shot, but that he's imprecise. Tough to say after a single game, but Strome scored as many goals tonight as the guy he's ostensibly replacing did in the last five weeks.
And What Of Nick Schmaltz? I was just saying that, if Stan Bowman was going to make a trade to shake things up it was going to be Schmaltz that goes, being as he was the most expendable asset that a) would fetch anything in return and b) didn't have a no-move clause in his contract. The occasional excellent game did not offset the frequency of games that left me saying "what does he do, exactly?"
Next: Winnipeg on Thursday and Nashville on Saturday, the two best teams in The Western Conference, so the guys had better conjure up some give-a-damn. I'm losing interest almost as fast as The Hawks are....
Dwight Yoakum - Things Change
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