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After a lousy road trip for the Chicago Blackhawks, they returned home to the United Center looking to get back on track. Before that bad trip, they were playing well. They have it in them to perform well but there are a lot of learning curves taking place.
With the Seattle Kraken on the other side, the Blackhawks got off to a good start. Early in the game, Connor Bedard scored to give Chicago a 1-0 lead. Artyom Levshunov, playing in his first career NHL home game, assisted on Bedard’s goal. That’s the future talking.
It looked like the Hawks were back when Tyler Bertuzzi deflected an Alex Vlasic shot home for the 2-0 lead. From there, things went bad for Chicago.
By the time the second intermission came around, the Blackhawks had relinquished five straight goals and were down 5-2.
After outshooting Seattle 15-9 in the first, the Hawks were outshot 13-6 in the second. The Kraken had tons of good chances and there wasn’t much Spencer Knight could do on most of them.
In the third period, the Kraken added an extra one to make it 6-2 which held up as the final. For the first time since 2023, the Blackhawks allowed six or more goals in back-to-back games.
Now, the Blackhawks are 0-4-1 in their last five games and can no longer use the road trip as an excuse. They have not played well in recent games and the vibes are way down.
"A gritty one," Jason Dickinson said when asked how you break out of a slump like this. "We are not a high skilled team. We are not a team that can play with a shootout mentality. We're not going to take it to 8-6, 8-7. Those are not games that we want to play. We gotta get into a gritty match where we're blocking every shot, we're getting into bodies, we're forechecking, we're turning pucks over, and making it miserable."
You can tell that Dickinson is bothered by the fact that this team is getting blown out at this point of the season. As one of the leaders on the team, it's on him to call stuff like this out.
"It's not gonna be fun to win hockey games that way." Dickinson continued. "Winning hockey games is (a lot more ) fun than this."
Next up for the Blackhawks is another home game on Thursday night. This time, the Los Angeles Kings are going to be in town.
"I mean, we'd like to hope so." Alex Vlasic said about turning things around before the end of the season. "You know, we're not going to go on a winning streak of ten games or something like that but I think we can go into next year happy about the way we play the rest of the season. I think we can play smarter, more for each other, just harder on pucks. I think it was pretty evident tonight that we just weren't doing that. We were turning pucks over and just felt like everybody was kind of playing a little selfishly tonight."
Vlasic is a young player who is still developing himself but he has taken on a leadership role with this team. These words carry weight coming from him based on his status with the team as their number one defenseman.
It's tough to lose in general but the vibes are at a season-low right now and games like this make it worse. As Dickinson said, it's going to take a gritty victory for them to break out of it and feel good about themselves again.
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