NEWARK, N.J. — The future is not now for the Chicago Blackhawks. Not with Oliver Moore and Sam Rinzel still majoring in dominance at the University of Minnesota. Not with Nick Lardis still toying with goalies in Brantford. Not with Artyom Levshunov still marinating in Rockford. Not with Sacha Boisvert and Marek Vanacker still on the distant horizon. Not with two more first-round picks, including potentially another No. 1 overall, still coming in June.
But the future was a little closer Saturday in Newark. And when you saw Frank Nazar jump on a loose puck and nearly tuck it in for a goal; or Kevin Korchinski flying down the ice from way back to break up a potential two-on-one; or Connor Bedard splitting the Devils defense and roofing one off the crossbar; or Drew Commesso making a spectacular glove save on Erik Haula from point-blank range; you can imagine a Blackhawks team that’s dynamic, that’s stout, that’s tough, that’s successful.
Then reality hits, and you realize this Blackhawks team is not any of those things. Not yet. Not for a while.
Saturday’s 4-1 loss to New Jersey — the second straight game in which the Blackhawks gave up three goals in barely two minutes in the third period — started out as a tease for the promise of youth, but ended as a reminder of the foibles of youth.
Yes, Nazar made his season debut and showed flashes of the speed and verve with which he can play. But he also lost six of seven faceoffs, had just one shot on goal and was under water at five-on-five.
Yes, Bedard continued to play with renewed confidence, but he also hit two posts and passed up on a couple of other chances for low-percentage passes.
Yes, Wyatt Kaiser continued to provide steady top-four minutes at age 22, but he also made one bad decision that led directly to the Devils’ three-goal barrage.
Yes, Korchinski showed off his incredible skating, but he also committed a bad turnover at the blue line that led directly to New Jersey’s third goal.
Yes, Commesso made his first start, and was terrific for most of the game as he held the high-octane Devils off the scoreboard for the first two periods. But he finished the game allowing four goals on 24 shots, even if it’s hard to find fault with him on any of them.
Yes, the Blackhawks continue to be competitive for two-thirds of the game — they scored first for the league-leading 19th time and were leading, tied or within a goal in the third for the 29th time in 30 games — but they continue to crumble at the slightest adversity. A few young faces, sure, but the same old story.
“If we had the answer, I’m not sure we would do it,” said interim head coach Anders Sorensen, who is now 1-3-0 since taking over for Luke Richardson. “We’re chipping away at it, we’re talking about it, looking at it. (It’s) probably more of a mindset than anything.”
The Blackhawks, simply put, are mentally fragile. And that’s the whole team — not just the young players. After Dawson Mercer got position on TJ Brodie and scored on a backdoor tap-in to tie the game at 1-1, Chicago responded relatively well. But then came a marathon shift in which the Devils had the Blackhawks pinned in their own end. Nearly two and a half minutes into the shift, the puck came to Kaiser in the left circle. He had plenty of time to clear the puck, or simply ice it and give the Blackhawks a chance to catch their breath. Instead, he hesitated, stickhandled a moment, and got absolutely manhandled by Jesper Bratt, allowing a fresh Jack Hughes to jump on the ice and give the Devils a 2-1 lead.
Jack Hughes opened the flood gates with this tiebreaking goal‼️@NJDevils | #NJDevils | #NHLNShowcase pic.twitter.com/lzVREE8kNG
— NHL Network (@NHLNetwork) December 14, 2024
It was poor decision-making by Kaiser, who was obviously gassed.
“Once you get tired like that, the brain starts to shut down,” said Jason Dickinson, who scored Chicago’s lone goal in the second period, his shot hitting the post and then Luke Hughes’ face before going in. “You stop seeing the open ice, you stop seeing the other options.”
The wheels came off from there. Nico Hischier scored less than two minutes later, and Timo Meier scored 18 seconds after that. Two days after giving up three third-period goals in 2:19 against the Islanders, Chicago gave up three third-period goals in 2:06 against the Devils. It doesn’t seem to matter how well they play in the early going, they simply fall apart when things get difficult.
An exasperated captain Nick Foligno said the Blackhawks have to toughen up mentally to handle the ups and downs of the game.
“Why are we getting so down after a goal?” Foligno said. “It’s the reality of the NHL. You’re not going to win every game 1-0. Teams are going to score, and we do it to other teams, so why are we so flustered after they score one on us? Now teams come in waves and we don’t know how to handle it. They score one goal — reset, next time (you) go out, do your job. It shouldn’t snowball into two, three, four goals.”
Said Dickinson: “You’ve got to mitigate the mistakes so that when they happen, it’s once and we move on. But it seems like it happens and then it happens again and we’re caving in ourselves, we’re feeling the pressure.”
It happened plenty under Richardson, whose tenure was marked by hesitant third periods, the team desperately hoping to kill off the last 20 minutes and escape with a win. It’s happening more dramatically under Sorensen. Chicago has given up nine five-on-five goals in the last two games, seven of them in the third period. Killing 21 consecutive penalties over eight games is great, but special teams don’t matter much if you’re getting throttled at evens.
Dickinson said that the only way to toughen up is to actually do it, and then realize what it feels like.
“Once it happens, you start to feel it and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what it is,’” he said. “We keep doing that and we’re going to keep feeling good, we’re going to keep creating offense and we’re going to keep the puck out of our net.
Until they find that resilience, there are just going to be more moral victories, more 40-minute efforts, more clinging to positives, more losses and more time until the future truly arrives, until this endless late-game frustration becomes a thing of the past.
“You see us getting frustrated,” Foligno said. “We’re not a team in a position to get frustrated right now. We’ve got to work our way through this and get ourselves out of it. There’s no help coming. There’s no team that’s going to give us a free night. They’re smelling blood right now.”
(Top photo of Nolan Allan and Drew Commesso: Elsa / Getty Images)
