Seth Jones feeling emotional weight of Blackhawks' constant losing: 'It's not fun for anybody in here'

Seth Jones played in his 192nd career Blackhawks game Wednesday, and for the 131st time, the Hawks lost.

That frequency of losing would wear on anyone competing in anything — in the NHL, in a beer league or in Chutes and Ladders. But for someone as talented as Jones, who’s aware the prime years of his career are slipping away at 29, it’s even more frustrating.

“It’s the third year of it,” he said. “It’s not fun for anybody in here. Hopefully we can continue to build and grow this thing to where it needs to be, but at the moment, it sucks. You’re going to the games and . . . it seems like every night you’re battling to score goals, battling to get wins. As an athlete, it just weighs on you, right? You play this game to win.”

Certainly, Jones is not exempt from responsibility for the Hawks’ poor results. He makes occasional mistakes defensively, and he has scored just one goal due to a comically tiny 1.0% shooting percentage.

But on a team designed to win, or at least contend, he still has the skills and experience to be a strong top-four defenseman, if not quite one who’s worth $9.5 million. It’s not his fault the team around him isn’t built to succeed at this point in the rebuild.

That’s the reality, though, and it creates a cycle of constant disappointment. NHL players universally say they have to enter every game believing wholeheartedly they not only can but will win. A team that loses as much as the Hawks is forced to stomach the disappointment of failure almost every night, then build back up that wholehearted belief for the next game, and over and over.

For young guys like Alex Vlasic and Kevin Korchinski, that process is easier because everything is fresh and exciting. For Jones, however, it can get old.

“As soon as you get comfortable losing, you’re effed,” he said. “Is that [21 road] losses in a row? That’s terrible. That’s embarrassing. But you have to go into the next game expecting to win, or else it’s going to be 10-0 in the game — you’ll have no chance from the drop of the puck. We do not want to get comfortable losing in here. That’s the worst thing that could happen.”

So, what’s his strategy to constantly rebuild expectations?

“You do some good things that you want to replicate in the next game,” Jones said. “You’ve got to game-plan differently for each team, but work ethic is always something you can control. Playing together as a five-man unit is something you can control. When you go into the game, you expect to do those things.

“[My] motivation is always there to try to lead the team from the back end and be that guy on the ice that is just solid every game, even when things aren’t going well. Everyone in here needs motivation to be better. Every-one is in here trying to prove something, from top to bottom, old to young. No one should be comfortable with the way they’re playing.”

Coach Luke Richardson has moved Korchinski up alongside Jones for some shifts the last two games, but Jones and Vlasic remain fairly locked in as the top pairing.

They’ve been two of the Hawks’ most reliable pieces this season.

It’s just impossible for anyone — besides, perhaps, rookie forward Connor Bedard — to truly excel on a 15-39-3 team.

“We’re in a weird situation here where we want to continue to grow and gain chemistry, and it’s not always going to work,” Jones said. “But you see us starting to move our feet a little bit more, crossing in the neutral zone, dropping to each other and things like that. I told Vlasic today, ‘Try new things out there.’ To be honest, what is there to lose at this point?”