No legacy was at stake Monday night in St. Louis. No jobs were on the line, no coaches were on the hot seat, no front-office shakeup was on the horizon. Hockey is hard, nobody repeats, the St. Louis Blues are very good, and even though the Blackhawks were bounced from the Stanley Cup playoffs in seven remarkable games, well, those three relatively new banners dangling from the United Center rafters surely will soften the blow.
But here’s the cold truth. No matter how great this series was, no matter how memorable and epic, no matter how unfair it was that two of the five best teams in the league met in the first round, the Hawks now are dealing with something they haven’t dealt with in four years: failure.
It’s not all or nothing in sports. A championship isn’t the only way to validate a season. There was no shame in losing in overtime in Game 7 of the 2014 Western Conference final on a fluky flutter off Nick Leddy’s sweater. There’s no shame in losing in Game 7 on the road against a legitimate Stanley Cup contender such as the Blues, either.
But looking at it in the cold hard light of the next day, a first-round loss, against your most bitter rival, after giving up so much at the trade deadline to bolster your team? That’s as bad as it gets in Hawks-land. That’s the reality when you raise the bar so high, with three Stanley Cups in six years, and 10 series wins in three years.
Stan Bowman, who has so masterfully maneuvered around the salary cap over the past few seasons, keeping his team at the top of the league despite losing star after star after star, did exactly what you want a general manager to do at the trade deadline: He went for it. The championship window was open, and he went for broke.
He landed the top rental forward on the market, Andrew Ladd, who immediately filled the Hawks’ most glaring need up front. He added two depth scorers in Tomas Fleischmann and Dale Weise. He even took a flyer on veteran defenseman Christian Ehrhoff, hoping he could be revived the way Michal Handzus, Michal Rozsival and Brad Richards were before him.
Well, aside from a memorable Game 6 at the United Center, the Hawks got precious little out of any of them. Ladd was a physical presence in the Blues series, but had just one goal. Fleischmann was a healthy scratch for Games 5-7. Weise had his one shining moment in Game 6, and was invisible for the rest of his Hawks tenure. And Ehrhoff was so deep in Joel Quenneville’s dog house after a couple of dog games, he fell behind the once-discarded David Rundblad on the depth chart. The Hawks needed blue-line help, and didn’t get it. They needed scoring depth, too, and didn’t get it, either.
For this, the Hawks gave up their top forward prospect, Marko Dano; a promising and reliable bottom-six center, Phil Danault; a first-round draft pick this June; and a second-round pick in 2018. For a team that will need more and more cheap young players each year, as the salary cap gets tighter and tighter, it’s nothing short of a disaster.
There’s a bright side. There always is. The Hawks look tired in this series, getting by on sheer force of will. They sounded drained. They were uncharacteristically sloppy, and maddeningly inconsistent from game to game, period to period, shift to shift. After playing into June for three straight years, a long summer could be just what they needed.
After all, the championship window is still open. It closes a little bit each year, as new contracts kick in, as players with loads of miles (think Marian Hossa and Brent Seabrook) get a year older, as the rest of the league starts to catch up. But Jonathan Toews is just 27. So is Patrick Kane. Duncan Keith will be an elite player for years to come. Corey Crawford is better than he’s ever been, one of the best goalies in the league. And Bowman and Quenneville, despite some missteps this season, still form as accomplished a management duo as any in the league.
In a few years, it might be easy to look back on 2015-16 as a mere blip, a rare stumble. But in the here and now, barring the Hawks’ most remarkable comeback yet, it feels like a lost season. When success is all you know, failure hits even harder.
Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com
Twitter: @marklazerus
