Blackhawks return to Winnipeg at least in better shape than they left it

The last time the Blackhawks were in Winnipeg, their performance was so pathetic and lifeless that it convinced a two-week-old general manager to fire their coach.

When the Hawks’ plane touched down again in Manitoba on Sunday afternoon, their big-picture outlook as a franchise was still far from stable. They still didn’t have a permanent GM — although that will change soon — and they still hadn’t named their next permanent coach. The sexual assault scandal and fallout still hung over everything; the team still sat near the bottom of the standings.

But at least it no longer feels like the organization is actively burning the ground, which is very much how it felt back on Nov. 5.

The otherwise irrelevant milestone of another road matchup against the Jets provides an opportunity to appreciate how significantly, albeit gradually, at least the Hawks’ day-to-day situation has stabilized.

In that first Jets meeting, the Hawks trailed 2-0 after the first three minutes and 4-0 at the second intermission en route to a 5-1 loss. They were dominated 33-18 in shots on goal, 35-19 in scoring chances and 13-5 in high-danger scoring chances. Worst of all, they demonstrated no signs of passion or resilience even once things started careening off the cliff.

Ugly, lopsided games like that are bound to happen a few times to any team in any 82-game season, and indeed, the Hawks’ 5-1 loss Saturday against the Blues looked remarkably similar in many ways.

The surrounding context in early November, though, set that game apart. The Hawks fell to 1-9-2 with the loss. They’d been outscored 42-15 and outshot 312-248 at even strength. It had been, at that point, almost a full month of incompetence and non-competitiveness. The direness of the circumstances was hard to comprehend.

“We recognize things but we haven’t been correcting them, and that’s our issue right now,” Connor Murphy said that night. “[I’m] sitting here right now talking about things, but to go out there and do it every shift is a different thing. And that’s what it’s going to take from each of us. That’s the challenge ahead of us.”

Then-coach Jeremy Colliton, who’d been fuming in postgame interviews after several previous losses, seemed resigned to the failure that night, arguing their effort was so far below the necessary level that they needed to just “leave this game.”

“We didn’t give ourselves a chance,” Colliton said. “We need to regroup. We’ve got a day off tomorrow. We need to come with energy and play better. We know we can play well.”

Colliton didn’t get to enjoy that day off; instead, he was fired. Interim GM Kyle Davidson, the following day, said it was the “way” the Hawks had been losing — not the losses themselves — that necessitated the move. A team source later said Davidson was already leaning towards firing Colliton but the Winnipeg game convinced him it was unequivocally the right decision.

Three months later, the Hawks are 17-24-7 — bad, but neither historically nor unbelievably bad.

The coaching change has worked out fairly well, with interim coach Derek King having restored unity and self-belief inside the locker room and molded the on-ice performance into something respectable, if boring. The GM search has been handled fairly well so far, too, with a number of qualified candidates being considered.

From a macro standpoint, this 2021-22 season will likely still be remembered as rock bottom, and the franchise has so far only taken the first first steps in their lengthy climb out of the valley.

From a micro standpoint, however, things have steadied significantly since November. Whether the Hawks win or lose Monday won’t really matter, and that’s not the worst situation to be in. They certainly couldn’t say that in November.

Read More