The last time I wrote about the Blackhawks was on Dec. 3 after a 4-3 SO loss to the Vegas Golden Knights. Since then, the Hawks won against the Los Angeles Kings 2-1, lost to the Kings 6-0, and then lost to the Anaheim Ducks 7-1 (a game in which I attended… unfortunately). I wasn’t going to pay much attention to the 6-0 Kings game, but after back-to-back blowouts… well, I guess I do have a couple of thoughts worth sharing.

The Defensive Structure

Let’s get this out of the way first. I’m not putting the blame on the Hawks' shortcomings in defensive zone coverage alone. Against the Ducks, the Hawks had zero effort across the board. You don’t need a 0.56 expected goals for at 5v5 to tell you that. Their offense lacked punch, too.

This is a young team still learning how to work their man-on-man/hybrid or whatever it is they’re trying to do. Whenever you watch a team that knows what it’s doing in the defensive zone, you can immediately identify what kind of coverage they’re trying to run. Zone defense is easy. Man-on-man tends to look a little chaotic, but it should be controlled chaos. Clues tell you that it’s a hybrid. Do they button up when the puck goes low? Do they leave a weakside forward in the high slot while strong side runs man-on-man? Are players' heads on a swivel, identifying their assignment, and not puck watching?

For the Hawks, it looks like chaos, which only compounds any sort of fatigue. Players chase the puck, look lost, and have zero awareness. This lack of awareness causes players to pass the puck to… no one (or the other team).

The answer might be to switch to a pure-zone coverage, right?

Wrong.

Look, with the type of players the Hawks have, a hybrid facilitates quick transitions and catching the opponent on their ass. You don’t want this team with puck-moving defensemen (at least, that’s what we think they have) shelling up and taking shots on goal like they’re on the frontlines in Ukraine.

The issue is, when the Hawks don’t even try to move the puck out of the defensive zone like a bat out of hell, well, an 87-34 shot attempt ratio happens in Anaheim. And I don’t need to tell you which side of that the Hawks were on.

Anything Else?

It’s no surprise the Hawks were going to get an ugly stretch with some market correction sprinkled in there. They had an absurd 1.050 PDO at one point. But saying a team is “PDOing” is a little lazy. They had phenomenal goaltending from Spencer Knight and incredible scoring from Connor Bedard. Their defensive zone issues were always there. You add in a stretch of bad goaltending, tired players, and bad DZC, and this is what we get.

The problem is the tired players part. I get this is a condensed schedule because of the Olympics, but I don’t like seeing this team mail it in during a back-to-back weekend. One loss was to a team they could have beaten (which they did already, ala the Kings), the other a team they should have at least played like they gave shit against.

A couple of days off before the next one when the New York Rangers come to town.