The lines that Jeremy Colliton unleashed at Blackhawks practice Friday — the morning after dropping to 0-2 on the fresh season — looked nothing like the trios he’d staunchly maintained throughout training camp.
Dylan Strome centering Patrick Kane and Andrew Shaw.
Jonathan Toews centering Alex DeBrincat and Drake Caggiula.
Brendan Perlini, a healthy scratch in the first two games, and Alex Nylander, a first-liner until Thursday, alternating reps on the fourth line alongside Ryan Carpenter and Zack Smith.
The lineup was about as fluid as one of the Hawks’ pre-practice smoothies, and Colliton admitted he had intentionally gone for the hodgepodge approach. All that mattered was that they were different than the ones that were out-chanced 57-35 by the Flyers and Sharks over the past week.
“We experimented a little bit,” the coach said. “We’ve got to play better, that’s the bottom line.”
There’s an aura of anxiety surrounding this team — at a strangely pungent level, considering the season is, after all, just two games old.
For all the talk of not reading too much into 120 minutes of hockey, the pressure currently placed on the Hawks by their suffocating organizational dynamic — increasingly old, formerly great and recently subpar — is already penetrating the United Center (and Fifth Third Arena) roofs.
Much of the immediate hand-wringing stems from the fact Kane and Toews have been terrible so far, from a possession standpoint. When the two star forwards have been on the ice together, the Hawks have registered just eight scoring chances (three high-danger) while conceding a whopping 30 (including 14 high-danger).
Toews has zero points and just four shots on goal to date. And although Kane did record three points in Prague and another pretty assist Thursday on Dylan Strome’s goal, he’s characteristically struggled defensively.
Thus the impetus for the giant shakeup.
The new top line could be quite interesting, though. it collectively accounted for three-fourths of the Hawks’ scoring in the home opener, between Andrew Shaw’s roaring two-goal Chicago return and the beautiful Kane-Strome give-and-go. There’s plenty of potential for success there.
“We’ve just got to get more pucks to the net,” Strome said postgame. “You see how good [the Sharks] are at getting pucks through and getting sticks on pucks, and I think they got three or four goals like that. We’ve got to do a better job of getting in the slot and getting in front of their goalie and tipping them.”
The new second line is substantially more peculiar.
Colliton probably hopes that the diverse strengths of its three members — Toews’ two-way puck-moving ability, DeBrincat’s playmaking and sniping, Caggiula’s blue-collar forechecking — will mesh smoothly.
“My whole career, I’ve pretty much started every training camp on the fourth line and, throughout the years, I’ve always moved up to some different lines and been able to play with some pretty good players,” Caggiula said Friday.
But considering that specific trio played less than one minute together all of last season, there’s not much preexisting data to judge them by.
Then again, line combinations with no preexisting track record, good or bad, is basically the whole idea.
Any other day, Nylander’s precipitous fall from favor — foreshadowed by an in-game demotion Thursday to the third line — would be the defining takeaway. Yet this practice shakeup was so big that it’s hard to identify any clear theme, other than the all-encompassing need for something different.
“I just think our game was too loose, so that’s the message,” Colliton said. “It’s not so much about the combos, it’s how we play shift to shift.”
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