3-2 Shootout Win
- Brad Marchand is such a little pain in the ass. He had two goals, neither of which were things of beauty, but he gets the job done. He seemed to eat Crawford up. If you count the shootout goal, he actually had a hat trick. At least the Hawks didn't get worked like the Kings did the following night.
- The Brandon Bollig goal was a sign from above, because he made a terrible decision from a terrible angle and was rewarded. There is no way Rask would have expected a bum like Bollig to shoot from that angle and get that kind of favorable bounce. Not only the goal, but he was creditted with another 7 hits. The UC scorekeeper must be giving him hits for just stepping on the ice.
- El Capitan definitely made the bonehead play of the night, after missing a shot and breaking his stick he proceeded to throw half of the stick into the crowd. As a result, he was assessed a 10 minute misconduct. Just drop it, kid.
- The Hawks had one of their few off nights at the dots, falling down into the 47% range. #TruckNutz got eaten alive, winning only 5 of 15.
- Toews and Kane finally stepped up in a shootout, and made it look easy. Quite frankly they should be doing this more often than not. These guys aren't rookies.
- Another assist for Duncan Keith, who just plows along towards his second Norris Trophy.
- Bickell was back in the doghouse/morgue playing a team low 8:36. I've given up trying to figure out what the hell is going on there. If Quenneville wants to play his $4 million power forward for only 14 shifts a game, so be it. He didn't see the ice the entire last four minutes of the game and one of his 4 third period shifts was only 9 seconds.
- The Hawks had their boots on the throats of the Wings, in the first period, and let them off the hook, surrendering a fast 2-0 lead with sloppy defensive play. Johnny Oduya was terrible for a majority of the night. He followed up each terrible decision with an even more stupid followup.
- Neither goalie was "great" but Jonas Gustavsson was swatting at flies all night. He fought the puck HARD, and the Hawks simply didn't cause enough chaos in his kitchen.
- The Shootout was a joke after El Capitan and Shooter. Hossa's move is now old, Kruger was pathetic, and Shaw was basic. The only real nice save Gustavsson was on Kane. People might not realize just how hard that secondary toe save was. Maybe the Hawks can now hire a shootout consultant, since their faceoff futility seems to be fixed.
- Speaking of faceoffs, the Hawks were excellent at the dots, winning an amazing 65% of their draws. This was with #TruckNutz winning only 45%. Toews and Kruger won a clownish 26 of 36 draws, and Shaw was just slightly over 50%.
- Bickell AGAIN played a team low 9:31. Something is amiss here. Even if his knees are sore, just plant his big ass in front of Gustavsson to cause some chaos.
- Has anyone put an APB out on the artist formerly known as Kris Versteeg? Between him and Bickell, they had a COMBINED nineteen and a half minutes. I can't honestly remember a single shift from either of them.
- The story of the night was that Helm, Cleary and Bertuzzi were each minus three, and the Hawks still lost the extra point.
- Duncan Keith unexpectedly missed the game with an illness, and the lack of puck movement on the back end showed.
- The "dynamic duo" of Oduya and Rozsival were minus 2. Take it for what it's worth. While the Hawks defense was absolutely walked through on the first Wild goal, Raanta misjudged the second goal, by Matt Cooke.
- The Hawks looked completely uninterested and anemic. They only managed 17 shots in the first two periods and then tried to turn it on in the third with 17 more. Kane's very late goal was too little too late.
- Bickell and Versteeg were still in the 8 minute range of ice time. WHATEVER! That's $6.2 million of forth line glory right there, not counting Handzus' million.
