When Patrick Kane thinks back to his 2007-08 rookie season, he remembers seeing a lot of Columbus, Detroit, Nashville and St. Louis.
The NHL schedule was formatted far differently then. The Hawks played those four teams — their then-Central Division rivals — eight times each. But they played only 10 of the 15 Eastern Conference teams at all, and those 10 just once each.
So when the NHL’s exclusively intra-division 2021 schedule landed in Kane’s hands, he felt like it was 2007 all over again.
“I like playing different teams, but I guess for this year, that’s just the way it is,” he said during training camp. “It kind of reminds of the schedule when I first came into the league ... but every game’s huge, because every game’s in your division.”
The Hawks’ game Friday at the Lightning, the latter half of the two-game set in Tampa, will be just the second of eight meetings.
In fact, the last of those eight meetings — on April 27 back in Chicago — is the only game on the Hawks’ entire initial 56-game schedule that is not part of a two- or three-game set.
Those sets will arrive on the calendar at a feverish pace, though.
The Hawks’ 56 scheduled games will take place over just 116 total days, meaning they’ll average just 1.1 days of rest between games. Last season, they played 70 games in 160 days before the coronavirus shutdown in March, averaging 1.3 days of rest between games.
In that sense, fatigue and injuries will be inevitably more common, and the Hawks will have to make full use of their newly instituted six-man taxi squad to keep the roster fresh.
But the condensed schedule should provide relief in other ways.
Because of the two-game sets and NHL efforts to make homestands and road trips longer and more efficient, the Hawks will only have 22 flights all season, or one every 5.3 days. And they’ll only have 14 unique hotel stays, which means one new hotel check-in every 8.3 days.
Last season, they had one flight every 3.1 days and arrived at a new hotel every 4.4 days.
“It is a tight schedule, but there’s not as much travel,” coach Jeremy Colliton said. “That’s where a lot of your practice time gets eaten up. For the most part, we’re staying in the same city for two games, so it’s going to give us a chance to get one [road] practice in at certain times.”
This format opens the door for the Hawks’ coaching staff to do more specific game-planning.
In a typical season, Colliton has little to no opportunity to scout and design a scheme tailored to exploit a specific opponent’s weaknesses the way NFL coaches can. This year, he will have time — and so will opposing coaches, doing the same to the Hawks.
“In the season, when you’re playing a different team every night, you’re a bit limited in how much information you want to give the players,” Colliton said. “Whereas in the playoffs or when you do play the same team multiple times in a short period, you can do more tactically and adjusting to teams.
“As a coach, that’s fun. And I think the players, especially if we frame it that way...are going to enjoy it, too.”
The constant exposure to the same opponents will — also just like the playoffs — stir up more emotion, too.
Eight Hawks-Red Wings matchups, a frequency not seen in the historic rivalry since that 2007-08 season, may well burn down the two cities.
“[When you’re] building up a little bit of a hatred for a team you’re playing over and over, something’s going to happen,” defenseman Connor Murphy said. “You’re going to get chippier, you’re going to start to get frustrated and it’s going to bring out the best in you. That part will be a lot of fun.”
