Take out a span of just over seven minutes, including the end of the second period and beginning of the third, and the Blackhawks played a very strong game Sunday against the Lightning.
All seven-minute spans count, though, and the five goals the Lightning scored during that time — including three goals in 32 seconds to set a franchise record — rendered the Hawks’ otherwise good effort irrelevant.
The end result was a 6-3 Lightning win that gave the Hawks their 14th loss in their last 19 games.
“That’s what they do,” interim coach Derek King said. “They strike, and they strike fast. It was just, ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ [It’s] tough for us to climb out of that. We don’t have that depth of firepower.”
The Hawks easily could’ve led 3-0 instead of 1-0 after the first period, with Kirby Dach hitting Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy’s stick handle on an open net and Connor Murphy and Alex DeBrincat ringing consecutive shots off the post. And the Hawks easily could’ve taken a 3-1 lead during a second-period power play in which Vasilevskiy twice robbed DeBrincat moving post-to-post.
But the Hawks didn’t — Patrick Kane later rightly called that squandered power play the game’s turning point — and the Lightning went to work, claiming a 3-2 lead before the second intermission and blowing the game out soon after the break.
“It started snowballing,” Riley Stillman said. “We’ve got to do a better job of parking things once they’re over. Once one or two go in, you’ve got to find a way to regroup.”
Kane, DeBrincat and Dylan Strome did each score, but Vasilevskiy was the main reason the Hawks’ 9-7 advantage in high-danger scoring chances didn’t translate onto the scoreboard.
“He made some saves [where] I had my arms up in the air, pretty much, and all of a sudden, this big leg appears or the glove hand comes up,” King said. “This game could’ve easily went the other way. Obviously it didn’t, but we’ll look at the video and we’ll probably realize we didn’t play as bad as we thought we did. We just gave them a little too much at certain times and they took advantage of it.”
Olympians honored
Six members of the U.S. women’s hockey team that won silver at the 2022 Olympics were honored pregame Sunday on International Women’s day.
Oak Lawn native and Hawks development coach Kendall Coyne Schofield headlined the group that also included Abbey Murphy (Evergreen Park), Megan Bozek (Buffalo Grove), Jesse Compher (Northbrook), Savannah Harmon (Downers Grove) and Alex Cavallini (Delafield, Wisconsin).
“Our team has so much to be proud of, regardless of the result,” Coyne Schofield said, referring to the 3-2 gold-medal game loss to Canada. “[Despite] what we overcame to get to the Olympics, and the adversity we faced, losing one of our best players 10 minutes into the tournament, there wasn’t one person who said, ‘We can’t win this thing.'”
