Blackhawks enter All-Star break with revived playoff hopes, but with work left to do

Somehow, only 31 remain in the Blackhawks’ 2019-20 season, which was once barely chugging by at steam-train speed.

Outside of All-Star representative Patrick Kane, the Hawks won’t take the ice again for more than a week — not until practice in Arizona on Jan. 30 — and won’t play again until Feb. 1. That’s because the team’s bye week, a practice instituted by the NHL three years ago, falls directly after this weekend’s All-Star break.

This lengthy stretch typically provides an opportunity for players to rest, vacation and prepare for the season’s stretch run, but conventional wisdom indicates it might be arriving at an inconvenient time for the Hawks. Winners of 11 of their last 16 games — even after an emotional 4-3 loss to the Panthers on Tuesday — the team presumably would have preferred no interruptions to this momentum.

Then again, the Hawks won their last two games before the break last season, then their first five after it to put together their longest winning streak of 2018-19. And defenseman Connor Murphy said Tuesday that the knowledge of the upcoming break has influenced the Hawks’ recent success, too.

“We’ve had a few back-to-backs lately, so sometimes it’s a little of that extra mental help, knowing that if you have a little bit of a break to recoup your body, you can give that extra little push,” Murphy said.

“You can look at it different ways, but anytime you’re winning, you want to keep that going any way you can and get back out there. You just roll with your schedule and whenever the games come.”

This winning has revived the Hawks’ formerly left-for-dead playoff chances, too.

They’re now tied with the slumping Jets for ninth in the West with 54 points. They trail the eighth-place Golden Knights by three points with a game in hand.

In the low teens at the holiday break, the Hawks’ odds of qualifying for the postseason are now up to 40.7 percent, according to MoneyPuck, and 33.8 percent, according to Hockey Reference.

The conference is notably weak and full of parity, with third place and 12th place separated by only seven points (58 to 51), so an enormously wide range of possible outcomes remains plausible. According to the odds, the Hawks currently top the Jets and Wild but unsurprisingly trail the Predators, Knights and Coyotes.

Coach Jeremy Colliton predictably believes in his team’s chances, even if he’s likely not poring over the projections too much yet.

“It’s up to us; it’s how we play,” Colliton said after the loss to the Panthers. “Guys like Kirby [Dach], I thought he was really good tonight. That’s very encouraging. That needs to be the case, where he takes steps forward. Up and down our lineup, [we have guys] who can continue to improve, and that needs to happen. And if it does, then we’re going to have a chance.”

Getting contributors back from injury should continue to help. The recent returns of Brandon Saad and Drake Caggiula have worked wonders. Dylan Strome could return soon after the break, although Colliton has been more pessimistic than expected about his time line recently. Colliton also has continually insisted that concussed Andrew Shaw could still return at some point this season.

And while the 51 completed games certainly outweigh the 31 to go, that latter number is still sizable.

“It’s important to keep the wins going because we’re still not in that playoff spot,” Murphy said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.”