Blackhawks are built to excel in shootouts — and they know itBen Popeon December 6, 2021 at 9:54 pm

Patrick Kane’s shootout goal lifted the Blackhawks to a win over the Islanders on Sunday. | AP Photo/Corey Sipkin

After beating the Islanders on Sunday, the Hawks are perfect in three shootouts this year and 27-15 in them dating back to 2014-15.

It was clearly a dumb strategy all along.

The Islanders employed the most patient — as in, boring — approach to three-on-three overtime seen in years Sunday against the Blackhawks, holding onto the puck for the vast majority of the five-minute period but refusing to take any risks to try to convert that possession time into scoring chances.

They were, essentially, playing for a shootout. And the Hawks — fully aware of their track record as one of the NHL’s best shootout teams — were happy to play along.

“[Mathew] Barzal likes to hold onto the puck, I guess,” Dylan Strome said afterward. “He was trying to get his Corsi up or something like that. He just kept circling back. Some of the guys were saying it was a pretty uneventful overtime, but sometimes it’s like that.

“We’ve got such good guys in the shootout that I think if we can take it to shootouts, more times than not we’ll win.”

After a combined four shot attempts in overtime — three by the Hawks — Patrick Kane scored in the shootout and Marc-Andre Fleury stopped all three Isles shooters to earn a rather predictable 3-2 win.

The Hawks are now 27-15 in shootouts since the start of the 2014-15 season, the second-best winning percentage in the NHL over that span. (The Avalanche rank first at 21-11; the Islanders, notably, are 29-31.) The Hawks are now 3-0 this season and have won five straight dating back to last season.

In a tiebreaker designed to be largely a crapshoot, the Hawks have broken the system — it’s only a crapshoot for almost everyone else. Nearly two-thirds of the time, they win.

That is predominantly because of two players: Kane and Jonathan Toews. Since the start of 2014-15, they’ve both been absolutely ruthless in shootouts; Kane is 19-for-40 (47.5%) and Toews is 17-for-36 (47.2%).

The league average is around 33%, by comparison, and among players with 20 or more attempts over that span, Kane and Toews both rank in the top 10. No other team has anything close to that kind of one-two punch of shootout shooters. And they’re only getting better, too: since 2018-19, Kane is 10-for-19 and Toews 9-for-15.

On the goalie side of things, the Hawks were briefly disadvantaged by Robin Lehner — whose inexplicable shootout ineptitude was a hot talking point in fall 2019 — but have generally enjoyed solid play from Corey Crawford and, now, Marc-Andre Fleury.

Fleury is 61-35 in shootouts in his career and has a .738 career shootout save percentage, which ranks seventh all-time (among the 73 goalies who have been in 20 or more shootouts). Crawford finished his career 34-24 with a .716 save percentage.

This season, Kane is 2-for-3, Toews 1-for-3, Alex DeBrincat 1-for-1 and Fleury has stopped all eight opponent attempts.

So how are they so good? The Hawks do occasionally practice shootouts as a team, relay-style. But the daily post-practice games of two-puck — in which Kane and Fleury are the most competitive — likely help even more.

And does it affect their overtime strategy? Strome said Sunday it doesn’t, at least not until the last 20 or 30 seconds, when he admitted they might decide not to take a risk knowing what’s coming otherwise.

The Hawks have been more patient in overtimes this year, however, sitting back and defending until they sense a moment to spring a two-on-one counterattack. Their overtime “pace” — measured by combined shot attempts, both by them and their opponent — is sixth-slowest in the NHL at 1.55 attempts per minute.

“It’s funny the way three-on-three has evolved,” Kane said recently. “It was kind of chaos to start, when they first introduced it. And then it was all about puck possession and holding onto it and trying to get the other team tired and change, get fresh guys out there. Now…we’re fine playing that transition game.”

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