Blackhawks cool off Sharks; Kane extends point streak to 17

SAN JOSE, Calif. — He hadn’t scored all season. He hadn’t played much all game. He had come agonizingly close to scoring on his previous shift. The Sharks had just scored 67 seconds earlier to draw within one goal, and had seized momentum in the game. And he was in his old building, against his old teammates.

Yeah, Andrew Desjardins wanted this one.

“I think you could tell in my reaction,” Desjardins said after his third-period goal that iced the Blackhawks’ 5-2 victory on Wednesday night. “I’m not much for cellies. I just kind of yelled as loud as I could, I think. It felt awesome.”

Desjardins’ gritty goal — cleaning up a Tanner Kero deflection of a Niklas Hjalmarsson shot — helped the Hawks end one streak as they continued another. The Sharks had won six in a row — all on the road in a triumphant tear through the Eastern Conference. But the Hawks gave them a rude welcome back to the West in one of their best performances of the season, holding San Jose without a shot for the first 13 minutes and dominating play for most of the game.

Meanwhile, Patrick Kane had two assists to extend his career-high point streak to 17 games, one shy of the record for American players and four shy of Bobby Hull’s franchise record.

“We knew this team was hot coming in,” Kane said. “We know they’re a fast-starting team at home. You start off not giving them a shot for a little while, it’s a good start to the game. We were happy with our start, and we just kind of rolled the rest of the game.”

Thirteen minutes into the game, the Hawks were up 1-0 on Brent Seabrook’s blast from the point (teed up by Kane), and were outshooting the Sharks 8-0. San Jose managed to tie it on the power play when Brent Burns one-timed a beautiful Joe Pavelski pass at 14:56 of the first period, but Jonathan Toews roofed a shot past Martin Jones on a 2-on-1 88 seconds later to make it 2-1 Hawks.

Duncan Keith’s seemingly harmless shot from the boards snuck through a Marc-Edouard Vlasic screen and past Jones to give the Hawks a 3-1 lead at 12:20 of the second. The Sharks took the first seven shots of the the third period and drew to within one when Patrick Marleau banked one in off the crossbar, but Desjardins — whom the Sharks traded to the Hawks last March — got his first goal of the season at just the right time. Andrew Shaw added an empty-netter in the final minute.

“Maybe on the road, it was our best complete game,” Joel Quenneville said. “We had a good game in Vancouver with nothing to show for it. Today, we got rewarded. Good back-to-back efforts as far as playing the right way.”

Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com

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