For the first time since Valentine’s Day, the Blackhawks entered Monday outside of a playoff spot. The Blue Jackets have matched the Hawks with 33 points in 32 games and hold the tiebreaker of regulation wins, nine to eight.
With that reality in mind, the Hawks took the ice in Chicago on Monday for the first time in two weeks, their 1-5 road trip finally in the past.
The full squad, including a now-cleared-for-contact Kirby Dach, practiced at Fifth Third Arena and did so with a heavy emphasis on transition offense.
Coach Jeremy Colliton hopes improvement in that area can jumpstart the entire team.
“We feel like we’re leaving a little bit on the table in transition,” Colliton said. “We can execute better and have more of a killer instinct in those situations.”
The drills in Colliton’s practices usually involve relatively few participants at a time. Two-on-one, two-on-two and three-on-three situations are most common, whether players are rushing the length of the rink or contained in one zone. Colliton doesn’t run full line rushes as often as other NHL coaches and teams do.
He didn’t run full line rushes Monday, either, but he did incorporate a new four-on-three drill that forced the Hawks to complete passes cleanly and move the puck through the neutral zone before closing in on the goalie. Another variation incorporated neutral-zone puck retrievals into the sequence.
“[We need to] be clean, be quick, play fast and then take advantage of those three-on-two, four-on-three [rushes] that hopefully we’re going to create,” he said.
“It’s one thing to have a play to make; you’ve got to make it. When you do that, you’re able to expose teams before they’re able to get numbers back to defend. We want to be fast, but part of being fast is making those plays, so it’s something we’ve been focusing on.”
After Saturday’s loss to the Lightning, Colliton noted his team had plenty of opportunities to create scoring chances — particularly in the third period — but squandered them due to a lack of urgency and sharpness.
When they noticed breakaway or two-on-one opportunities, they did take them; stellar Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy just shut them down. But they seemed less eager to rush ahead for counterattacking opportunities when larger numbers of both Hawks and Bolts were involved in the play.
That lack of offensive volume was a trend throughout the road trip. During five-on-five play, the Hawks averaged only 31.5 shot attempts and 16.0 scoring chances per game. That was their worst six-game stretch this season; they’d averaged 41.4 attempts and 20.6 chances per game previously.
“We just have to be a little bit sharper, whether that is setting someone else up with a better pass tape-to-tape or finishing it off with shooting the puck,” wing Mattias Janmark said. “The intentions are there and we can be a little bit quicker: as soon as we win the puck, everybody be ready, everybody get open.”
Maintaining Dylan Strome’s momentum — he has been excellent in his first two games back from concussion — and getting Dach back as soon as possible will help the Hawks’ offense in all aspects, but particularly this one.
David Kampf and Pius Suter aren’t exactly counterattacking whizzes between Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat on the first line; Strome, who possesses more of those playmaking elements, was elevated to that top center role for most of the game Saturday and could start there Tuesday against the Panthers.
Colliton said Monday that there still isn’t a timeline for Dach’s return but that Dach’s “ability to push the pace from goal line to goal line” will be helpful when he is cleared.
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