The last time — before this season — the Blackhawks lost 29 times in a 35-game span, Duncan Keith wasn’t in the NHL yet.
The second-to-last time the Hawks did that, Pierre Pilote wasn’t in the NHL yet.
Indeed, the frequency of losing that this season’s Hawks have experienced is so rare throughout franchise history that 2003 and 1954 are the last two instances.
Since winning consecutive games on Dec. 7 and 9 — and it’s not like they had fared well before that, going 7-16-1 up through Dec. 5 — the Hawks have endured separate losing streaks of two, three, four, five, six (their active streak) and eight games. Despite how hard they’ve worked to build an uplifting culture this season, everybody feels demoralized right now.
“It’s really hard to stay positive,” forward Ryan Donato admitted Saturday after the Hawks’ ugly loss to the Blue Jackets.
“But you have to. It’s a long season. There are a lot of ebbs and flows. If you’re negative all the days, it’s just going to be miserable.”
To Donato, the only encouraging aspect of all this losing is the fact that the Hawks’ young players — the players who really matter long-term — are seriously upset about it.
It’s fairly foreign to them. Connor Bedard actually experienced far more losing on his Regina junior team than the average superstar prospect does, but Alex Vlasic (at Boston University) and Kevin Korchinski (on his Seattle junior team) certainly did not.
“These young guys are hungry,” Donato added. “They don’t like losing. That’s a good thing. That’s the biggest thing I take away from it. That’s a bright spot in the future, how sick of losing these guys are.”
As a side note, even though it feels like the Hawks’ NHL “young guys” group is larger than only three guys, that’s the reality at this point. Arvid Soderblom is getting old quickly.
Lukas Reichel and Wyatt Kaiser turned out to need more grooming in the AHL. Frank Nazar, Landon Slaggert and Colton Dach haven’t quite reached the NHL yet, although they all could during this season’s stretch run.
Oliver Moore, Drew Commesso, Ethan Del Mastro, Sam Rinzel, Ryan Greene and others are still progressing through the pipeline. And Philipp Kurashev, Isaak Phillips and Louis Crevier might turn out to be long-term pieces, but this isn’t their first taste of losing in Chicago.
Bedard, Vlasic and Korchinski are as important to the Hawks’ future as any trio could be, though. And Donato wasn’t kidding about them collectively being ticked off and fired up to reverse the team’s fate as soon as possible, as difficult as that will be.
“Yeah, it’s hard,” Bedard said. “It sucks. You never want to lose. The amount we’ve done it so far is obviously frustrating, and you can ask anyone in the room. But I think you try to stay positive and try to win the next game. It’s always on your mind, and you want to fix it.”
Coach Luke Richardson, on one hand, is glad his kids feel this way. On the other hand, he realizes he must help them channel these emotions “in the right direction.”
Frustration and anger about the team losing games can’t morph into frustration and anger about every little thing that goes wrong and a sense of futility and pointlessness about every little thing that goes right.
“We don’t want to get complacent with not winning and send the wrong message, but they have to understand when they do exercise a good play and execute it, that’s great,” Richardson said. “We might not win that game, but we have to show those individual steps and let them have something to cling to and build on.
“Otherwise, if it’s all about winning and losing right now, it’s going to be tough for them to absorb that they did anything right this year.”
