In a strange turn of events, the Blackhawks played a crucial role in the wildest night of the NHL regular season Wednesday.

The Hawks’ 4-3 shootout victory against the Golden Knights at the United Center eliminated the Knights from playoff contention for the first time in their history.

”It’s nice to spoil their party,” defenseman Caleb Jones said. ”We kind of tried to play spoiler. We wanted to beat those guys and send them home, too. So it was fun to get the win.”

Tyler Johnson’s goal in the seventh round of the shootout and Kevin Lankinen’s seventh consecutive save decided the game at the same moment the Stars clinched a point in their matchup against the Coyotes. The Knights had needed a victory and a Stars loss in regulation to stay alive.

For a while, however, both results hung in the balance. The Knights and Hawks were tied 3-3 from late in the second period on, and the Coyotes rallied from 3-0 down to tie their game 3-3 in the third period before eventually winning in overtime.

All of those implications mattered little to the Hawks, who will finish their largely miserable season Friday at the Sabres. But winning their last two home games at least provided something to take pride in.

”We actually played a pretty solid game,” Johnson said. ”We were pretty good defensively. It was good to get rewarded that way.”

Noncommittal Toews

Approaching the final year of his contract, which expires in the summer of 2023, captain Jonathan Toews was again noncommittal about his plans beyond that point.

”I’m not going to comment on after next season because I have no idea,” he said. ”I’m not going to think about that too much and just going to enjoy this offseason and . . . the process of getting myself ready for next year and feeling good again, feeling like myself again. [I’ll] take next year however it comes.”

Toews has spent much of the spring grumbling about his and the Hawks’ uncertain futures without making any concrete decisions. It’s just as unclear when he might make those decisions, and he has earned the patience.

The only new things he said regarded his season overall.

”[This was] not what I expected out of myself, even though I missed an entire season,” he said. ”[It] was definitely more challenging than I expected it to be. It was a tough year in a lot of ways, but . . . I learned more about myself and the game than [in] any of those years where we were on top of the world. It wasn’t easy, but [there were] definitely a lot of blessings in there.”

McCabe plans summer

Last summer, defenseman Jake McCabe was coming off season-ending knee surgery in February and was limited in the workouts he could do. He will have no restrictions this summer, however.

”Whenever you’re focusing on one body part, other areas get left hanging in the balance,” he said. ” . . . It’ll be really nice to not have to focus so much on knee rehab and [get] back to my normal training schedule.”

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MILWAUKEE — The Bucks lost forward Khris Middleton to a sprained MCL and responded with three consecutive victories over the Chicago Bulls, advancing to the second round of the NBA playoffs with a 116-100 win in Game 5 on Wednesday.

The Bucks will play the Celtics in the second round; Game 1 is scheduled for Sunday in Boston.

After splitting the first two games of the series, Milwaukee asserted its dominance over Chicago. The Bucks held the Bulls to under 100 points in three of the five games, winning each of the final three games by double digits.

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Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 33 points on 11-of-15 shooting, adding nine rebounds, in the series finale.

With Bulls guards Zach LaVine (health and safety protocols) and Alex Caruso (concussion protocol) both sidelined for Wednesday’s game, the Bucks were able to key in defensively on Bulls star DeMar DeRozan, who was limited to 11 points on 5-of-10 shooting.

All 10 of DeRozan’s field goal attempts were contested, and he was double-teamed 27 times in Game 5, the most doubles of a single player in a playoff game in the past three seasons, according to research by ESPN Stats & Information. He faced 24 double-teams in the previous four games combined.

The Bucks turned up the defensive intensity to make up for the absence of Middleton, who sprained the MCL in his left knee during the fourth quarter of Game 2.

The team’s initial timeline for Middleton had him scheduled to be reevaluated in two weeks, which puts his availability for the start of the second round in jeopardy.

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ATLANTA — The Cubs bullpen carried a heavy load Wednesday as the Cubs beat the Braves 6-3in extra innings.

Wednesday was essentially a bullpen day for the Cubs, with manager David Ross pulling starter Mark Leiter Jr. after throwing two scoreless innings.

The right-hander had consistently tossed shutout frames the first time through a lineup in his previous two starts, but he’d gotten into trouble after that. So, Ross left him in for 10 batters, facing Braves leadoff hitter Ozzie Albies twice.

Then, the bullpen took the ball for the rest of the game. And though the Braves tied it up in the eighth, the Cubs’ staff held off the Atlanta offense long enough for a comeback.

At the end of a whirlwind spring training, during which the Cubs went on a veteran pitcher signing spree, the Cubs bullpen was made up of a mix of experienced pitchers and youth. That dynamic was on display Wednesday.

“You just appreciate the day to day consistency of the way [the veterans] attack their job,” Cubs bullpen coach Chris Young said. “And I think the young guys have been really receptive to just kind of watching.”

On Wednesday, the veterans watched as the young relievers held the Braves to one run through the sixth inning. Then, they handled the back end.

When multi-inning reliever Keegan Thompson took the ball in the third inning, the Cubs had expanded their lead to 3-0.

Thompson has filled a crucial role for the Cubs early in the season, coming off a condensed spring training when starters didn’t have the time to build up to their normal work loads.

“He’s just filling up the strike zone and challenging guys,” Young said last week. “I think every time he goes out there he gets more confidence and belief in just how good his stuff is when it plays in the strike zone. It’s been a lot of fun to watch.”

Entering Wednesday, Thompson had yet to allow a run in four outings. That streak ended on Wednesday at 16 1/3 innings, as Braves five-hole hitter Travis d’Arnaud drove an RBI single to center field. It was bound to eventually. But that was the only run Thompson gave up in a three-inning outing.

Side-armer Scott Effross replaced Thompson, tossing a 1-2-3 sixth inning which featured a diving play on a ground ball up the line from first baseman Frank Schwindel.

Those two relievers represented the youth in the Cubs bullpen. They’re both right-handed homegrown pitchers, but they give completely different looks to hitters with wildly different arm slots.

Some combination of Rowan Wick, Chris Martin, Mychal Givens, and David Robertson have consistently made up the back end of the bullpen for the Cubs — all veterans except for Wick.

On Wednesday, Martin, an imposing presence on the mound at 6-foot-8, took the mound in the seventh and retired the side in order against his former team.

Right-hander Mychal Givens took over in the eighth. But he couldn’t quite work out of a bases-loaded jam, giving up a two-run single to Dansby Swanson as a groundball single snuck through a hole on the right side of the infield with two outs.

Robertson replaced him to get the final out of the frame, but the Braves had tied up the game. Robertson struck out the side in the ninth to force extra innings. Ross has not named an official closer, but Robertson leads the team in saves.

The offense delivered in the 10th, aided by the extra-innings ghost runner on Cubs cleanup hitter Willson Contreras’s RBI double. But they would have scored without the free runner to start the frame. Patrick Wisdom followed up Contreras’ heroics with a two-run double.

Wick secured the Cubs’ win with a scoreless final frame.

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DeMar DeRozan was saying all the right things heading into Wednesday’s Game 5 elimination game.

That’s what the Bulls veteran had done all season long.

But without Zach LaVine (health and safety protocols) and Alex Caruso (concussion), as well as facing the daunting task of facing the defending NBA champions in their house down 3-1 in the best-of-seven first-round playoff series, DeRozan knew there was also a reality that was going to be faced.

A reality that meant even more attention would be thrown his way.

“I trust my teammates,” DeRozan said. “I understand what’s going to come our way, so it’s up to me to use their aggressiveness, however they try to attack me, take the ball out of my hands, however that may be. Just me being more aggressive, getting my teammates the ball and figuring out how to pick and choose my spots.”

A good plan, but one that had very little hope of playing out the way DeRozan wanted.

Milwaukee ended DeRozan’s storybook season, holding him to just 11 points in the 116-100 Bucks win, as well as sending the Bulls into the offseason filled with more questions than answers.

Questions that will begin to be answered over the next days when players and the front office are expected to talk about what went right and wrong in the roller coaster season.

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You know, there was one thing Wednesday that was even more ridiculous than the Bulls — a losing team for the last three-plus months, and now down two starters — going into Milwaukee and trying to win a do-or-die playoff game.

It was NBC News political correspondent Steve Kornacki appearing on NBC Sports Chicago’s pregame show to do a little handicapping. Kornacki, whom many of you undoubtedly can imagine in his signature semi-rumpled, sleeves-rolled-up, overly eager element, wasted his breath on the Bulls’ chances in a cringe-inducing promotional segment for the online sportsbook Points Bet.

Remember when news people were serious? Remember when the media weren’t blatantly for sale?

“If you ever could put a few bucks on the Bulls,” Kornacki said, pointing to their 2.3% chance to come back from a 3-1 deficit and win the series and their 500-to-1 odds to win the NBA championship, “you could become a very rich person if they could go all the way to the title.”

Sure, Korno. Why don’t we go ahead and wager Junior’s college fund on Alabama and Mississippi turning blue in 2024, too?

But now, without further ado, allow me to offer some expert analysis of the Bulls’ season-ending 116-100 defeat in Game 5 of a first-round series that was so uncompetitive, so unsightly, so anticlimactic, it could take the sport generations to recover. Here goes:

On the game’s first possession, Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo rebounded a teammate’s missed jumper with one hand, cocked his right arm while hanging in the air and tomahawked a dunk to open the scoring.

And that about does it. Great game, everybody. Thanks for coming out. Don’t forget to tip your servers and be careful getting home.

The last three games of this series — with the Bucks outscoring the Bulls by a combined 70 points — were so lopsided, they called to mind the conclusion of the teams’ previous postseason series, in 2015. Only that first-rounder was won by the Bulls, who put the Bucks out of their misery by a cartoonish score of 120-66 in Game 6. Merely 20 years old at the time, Antetokounmpo scored five points before being ejected late in the first half. Hilariously, the Bucks were led in scoring that night by villainous big man Zaza Pachulia, who had a whopping eight points.

These Bucks will move on to face the soaring Celtics, a major challenge as Antetokounmpo and the sweet shooters around him seek to defend their NBA crown. The Bulls lurch into what could be a difficult offseason, with Zach LaVine having a knee problem to figure out and a max contract to go after. No doubt about it, the roster requires a good bit of reconstruction.

The Bulls were without LaVine and fellow starting guard Alex Caruso on Wednesday. The Bucks missed veteran reserve guard George Hill all series and had to play the last three-plus games without All-Star guard Khris Middleton, who has a sprained ligament in his left knee.

“When you face a little bit of adversity, it brings out the best in you,” Antetokounmpo said. “You don’t necessarily have to lose a game. But, at the end of the day, when things don’t go well, either you fold or you quit or you find another way to affect the game and come out tougher, come out stronger.”

Must be nice. The Bulls were dead men walking before they even entered the Fiserv Forum.

“It’s Zach, you know what I mean?” DeMar DeRozan said. “It’s hard to replace that.”

The Bulls played 15 games without LaVine during the regular season and went 9-6. Not bad, right? Apply that .600 winning percentage to an 82-game schedule, and we’re talking about an even better record than the 46-36 mark the Bulls actually finished with.

Fact is, the Bulls were the same team without LaVine that they were with him. Nobody gets a gold star for beating the Lakers, Rockets, Pacers, Thunder, Spurs and Kings without one of the team’s All-Stars. The only teams with a pulse the Bulls beat when LaVine was out of commission were the Cavaliers (twice) and, in the regular-season finale, a Timberwolves squad playing without Karl-Anthony Towns and D’Angelo Russell and with Anthony Edwards chilling alongside them for the whole second half.

Always in character, the Bulls got their rear ends handed to them by top competition all season no matter who was in the lineup. Without LaVine, they lost to the Celtics, the Grizzlies, the 76ers, the Bucks. They were also blown out by the Warriors at the United Center on a January night when LaVine lasted only four minutes. It was an early sign that the Bulls were pretenders despite what, at the time, was a gaudy record.

So that’s it, then. All she wrote. The Bulls will have to get ’em next year — 25 seasons and counting since their last championship.

A Bulls title in 2023? It’s certainly a long shot, but you know what that means: You can bet on it.

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