Sometimes you don’t need to be the best team on a particular night to win in the National Hockey League. Every now and then you can be thoroughly outplayed but your goaltender stands on his head and you score a goal or two more than the opponent. That is exactly what happened for the Chicago Blackhawks in Thursday night’s game against the Dallas Stars. It was another display of bad luck for Dallas and another case of resiliency to win at all costs for Chicago.
The Hawks were coming off a big loss to the Stars in Patrick Kane’s 1000th career game on Tuesday night. It was a fun game in terms of acknowledging one of the greatest Chicago athletes ever but the 6-1 smacking was no fun at all. Coming back and winning 4-2 in the rematch was just what they needed.
With the way the standings are right now, this looked like a must-win game for the Chicago Blackhawks.
The Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, and Carolina Hurricanes feel like the three locks to be in the top four of the division (the top four go to the playoffs). The Hawks currently hold that fourth spot in the division right now and don’t look like they are relinquishing that any time soon.
The Dallas Stars are in second to last place with 21 points. They are, however, more of a threat to catch the Blackhawks who have 33 points for two big reasons. For one, the Hawks have seven more points than the Columbus Blue Jackets who are in fifth and ten points more than the Nashville Predators who are in sixth. Both of those teams are on a hard decline and don’t look good at all right now.
As for the Dallas Stars, they are 12 points behind the Blackhawks but they have played six fewer games due to a COVID-19 pause. If they won all of those games they would be tied with the Hawks. Now, you’d rather be in the Hawks position because of the fact that they have the points banked already and the Stars still have to go earn them. The Stars were also the winners of the Western Conference in 2019-20 and runner-up in the Stanley Cup Final so you know their roster is good.
Because of all that, it is very good that the Hawks took one of two from them. Losing both in regulation would have been terrible. They didn’t deserve to win because they were outplayed hard but that doesn’t matter. Two points are two points. As they say, “they don’t ask how they just ask how many?”.
The Blackhawks won in large part to some outstanding goaltending from Kevin Lankinen. He has been awesome this year and Thursday night was no different. He made 28 saves on 30 shots and only gave up two goals. It was a solid performance that allowed his team to win. They only had 16 shots on goal themselves so it wasn’t an even game.
They were efficient with those 16 shots, however, as they put four of them by Stars goalie Anton Khudobin. Dominik Kubalik, Carl Soderberg, Duncan Keith, and Alex DeBrincat all scored goals to get the Hawks just what they needed. Of course, Patrick Kane collected two assists to help his case for the Hart Trophy. This group wasn’t as explosive as we are used to seeing them as far as chances but they got the job done anyway.
One player who deserves some extra special credit for the way he played is Adam Boqvist. He has been horrible for the most part in the early stages of his career but he collected two assists in this game as well. He earned the second star of the game as a result of his play as well. If he can continue to play well and prove all the naysayers wrong, this Hawks team just got that much deeper. Hopefully, that can happen and this team can continue to grind out big wins.
