A few minutes after the Blackhawks’ 5-2 loss Sunday night to the Sharks, winger Patrick Kane met the media in front of his stall in the team’s quiet and mostly vacated dressing room.
About 15 feet to his left was a display honoring past Hawks glories, and Kane himself was a part of a handful of those triumphs. In the bowels of the United Center, Kane has taken part in celebrations of many of those wins with future Hall of Famers and team legends.
But on this night, Kane was grappling with another loss by the worst team in the NHL at the depths of a long and painful rebuild. Instead of being asked about a pivotal moment in a big game like he had been so many times earlier in his career, Kane fielded questions about what went wrong against San Jose, and how challenging it is for the Hawks to stay positive despite their struggles.
“Yeah, it’s tough,” Kane said. “Obviously we’ve been losing a lot of games and I think it wears on a lot of guys. Guys get frustrated. It’s understandable. At the same time, when we’re in positions like we are tonight, we’ve got to find a way to not give up so much so easy. It’s obviously been a problem all year for us.”
As Kane alluded to, the Hawks put themselves in a good position Sunday. Facing a lowly Sharks team in front of one of the biggest United Center crowds of the season, the Hawks jumped out to a 2-0 second-period lead but wilted.
Obviously, it wasn’t the start of a new year the Hawks wanted.
“I think we had the right attitude,” Kane said. “Guys want to win. Guys are staying positive. Especially tonight, I think we had a new outlook on things after the last year and it being a new year and trying to start off the way we wanted to. It looked like it was going right there for a while and then it wasn’t.”
While 2023 could bring significant changes for Kane and Jonathan Toews via trades to contenders and subsequent free-agent contracts with new teams, the struggles for the Hawks they’d leave behind figure to continue. Sunday was painful for the Hawks, and not just because of the loss but how it occurred.
Forward Sam Lafferty, whose goal gave the Hawks a short-lived 2-0 lead, sounded similar to Kane when asked how difficult it is to stay positive in the midst of the team’s losing.
“Yeah, it’s challenging,” Lafferty said. “A night like tonight we had momentum and then it’s gone out of nowhere. So tomorrow we just regroup. The good thing about hockey is you get to keep playing. We got a game in two days. So it’s another opportunity for us.”
The rest of the season will provide opportunities for players to produce some positives. On Sunday, there was defenseman Ian Mitchell keeping the puck in the offensive zone and finding Kane in the slot for the Hawks’ first goal of 2023. Players like Lafferty will have chances to establish themselves and carve out roles.
There will also be more learning experiences for the Hawks as they go through what could be an extremely trying season that might see their two franchise stalwarts move on. On Sunday, they saw what happens when they are too safe against players like San Jose’s Erik Karlsson and Logan Couture.
“We have to get over that, otherwise it’s going to be a long, difficult road to get out of it,” coach Luke Richardson said. “It’s up to us.”
