FavreFan wrote:
CH, if im gonna try to start watching Hawks games now, wanna give me a layman' version of what to expect and how they are as a team? I don't know much about anyone outside of Toews, Keith, Kane, and Crawford.
24-year-old Artemi Panarin is the presumptive rookie of the year, with the wrinkle that he's been playing professionally in Russia for years and only now came over once he saw the way the ruble (and in turn the KHL, Russia+'s league) was heading. Think Hideki Matsui for the Yankees in 2003. Playing on the other side of Patrick Kane, he's been, well, a younger Patrick Kane, and though he's still a little rough around the edges with giveaways (see: tonight), he's playing like a long-lost twin. Kane and Panarin are centered on the nominal second line by Artem Anisimov, another Russian but a six-year NHL veteran who started with the Rags and went over to the Beej in the Nash trade. Anisimov is the overlooked member of the line because he doesn't rack up goals and assists like Kane and Panarin do, but he screens the goalie very well and enables his partners' scoring just fine. He could stand to be better at faceoffs, which we're actually supposed to have a specialist on staff for, but I see how people believe that if you haven't mastered the faceoff by now, you never will.
Up on the "first" line, Toews has been centering Andrew Shaw and Marian Hossa. Hossa is going to go down as one of the best two-way wings of his generation and should punch his HHOF ticket when/if he scores #500 this year, but while he's just as tenacious on the backcheck as he's ever been, he isn't scoring like he used to. (Sadly, most of the guy's great scoring years were wasted on a bunch of choking Senators teams, and his career year was wasted in irrelevance and obscurity on a team that doesn't even exist anymore.) This, combined with Toews's elite defense, has made the first line, usually designated the "scoring" line, more of a "shutdown" third line. The Ducks have done this for several years with Getzlaf and Perry getting first-line ice time and shutdown duty. It hasn't served them all that well. Andrew Shaw is on Toews's left, where he agitates and gets up around the goalie to clean up garbage. It's popular among "intelligent" Hawks fans to resent Shaw for being a scrappy fan favorite, but I like the little shit and believe he does bring something immeasurable to the team: as a draft pick, a Rockford graduate, and fifth-year Blackhawk, whatever it is he brings is uniquely worth more to us than it would be worth to someone else. All that being said, he's a textbook bottom-six wing, and he doesn't belong on a line with two Hall of Famers. I don't expect to see him there in April.
The third and fourth lines are in flux with trades and injuries, so don't expect this to hold up to the playoffs either. The third line is usually a scoring line for the Blackhawks (the traditional breakdown is scoring, two-way, checking, energy; Hawks have generally had the luxury of three balanced lines and a shutdown, dispensing with the cannon fodder altogether), but I guess right now it's closer to a standard-issue checking line than it was with Sharp and Vermette last spring. Andrew Desjardins came over from the Sharks around last year's deadline and elevated his game from fourth-line plug to respectable shutdown winger; this year after a rough start he's really flourished as a power forward with deceptive scoring touch. That's thanks to Philip Danault (pron. duh-NO, he's of the dying breed that is the French-Canadian NHLer) at center, yet another 2011 draft pick (Shaw, Saad, some dudes who got traded for other dudes), who came up after Marcus Kruger's season-ending wrist injury and has been kind of a revelation, hounding the puck extremely well and facilitating offense better than Kruger ever could. The highly regarded Teuvo Teravainen is on his right. Teuvo is a little frustrating, because we know he has it in him to play on a top line, but playing him on the wrong side of the ice for him at #1LW with Toews and Hossa has failed to get anything going, and while he's supposed to be a center, he's not supplanting Toews, Anisimov, or even Danault, so he's blocked there, too. Compounding the frustration is that he hasn't trusted himself enough to shoot, which fizzles out scoring chances and draws comparisons to Kris Versteeg, though Teuvo has rarely/never been as low-IQ as Versteeg. Some people think Panarin obviates Teravainen altogether. I wouldn't go that far, but there does seem to be a glass ceiling that wasn't there before.
With the useless and irrelevant Ryan Garbutt sent off to Anaheim, that nice farm out in the country where uncreative plodding dipshits get to frolic with other uncreative plodding dipshits, I'm even less sure what the fourth line is going to be about now. With more traditional shutdown men in Desjardins and Danault up on the third, I'd expect a more typical junk drawer of project players and tweeners running short and simple shifts and just trying not to get lit up by other teams' first lines. Dennis Rasmussen is the center, a big-bodied guy Bowman plucked out of the Swedish league to fill the roster in Rockford. He ended up impressing down there (I can vouch) and got the call; whether he lasts is anyone's guess. Bryan Bickell was also on this line, but he got Beefarooed again the other day and is all but down for the count at this point. Richard Panik came over from Toronto a couple weeks ago as a high-upside reclamation project. Jiri Sekac (pron. YEER-zhee say-KOTCH but I wouldn't bet on anyone pronouncing that accented Czech R right) did the same for Garbutt, the master of lobbing a shit shot right at the goalie's chest. Sekac and Panik seem to be birds of a feather to me, works in progress who will get their chances to shine if only they buy what Q sells. Brandon Mashinter is Rockford's captain but has been up here because he makes the league minimum and we need to bank cap space for the deadline. He's thoroughly useless, but we got him in a trade for a guy who was even more useless, if you can believe that. My guess is that once Kruger returns, either in the last week of the season or the first round of the playoffs if we're gonna juke the LTIR system again like with Kane, he'll slot back in at his rightful #4C. How the rest of this dust settles between now and the TDL, your guess is as good as mine.
Brent Seabrook and Niklas Hjalmarsson are the other two key defensemen behind Keith, Dunc-n-Seabs used to be an unbreakable pairing but now it seems to be Keith with Seabrook on power plays and Keith with Hjalmarsson at even or short. Seabrook isn't as offensively inclined as Keith but will surprise you now and then; Hjalmarsson is as pure a stay-at-home defenseman as you'll find and will block shots that you think should shatter a bone and end his season but then he keeps coming back for more. Seabrook gets shit for being slow and fat. I don't really see it. Off the ice, he's considered second in leadership behind Toews and has been even before being named an alternate captain.
This part here is really the crux of how the Hawks' fortunes turned around this month. The return for Patrick Sharp was the aforementioned Garbutt and Trevor Daley, Dallas's #1 defenseman in name only for the last few years because of how bereft they were at the position before Klingberg hit the scene. Daley was the bad fit to end all bad fits, and no, not because he's black, but because freelancing it on defense for years because no one cares does not build positive habits for a team that, despite all the flash and star power, is as committed to defensive effort as any dead-puck team ever was. Quenneville and his lieutenants didn't trust Daley from training camp, proving that you don't have to grow up in Chicago not to trust a Daley here, and so began a self-fulfilling prophecy of Daley getting reduced ice time from his Dallas days, doing fuck-all with it, and thus getting even less ice time until he finally demanded a trade. So off he went to Pittsburgh for Rob Scuderi, who is old and slow. Penguins fans laughed so hard at us for acquiring a defenseman as bad as Scuderi until we pointed out that of course he's going to be bad if you play him for 20 minutes every game. Here, it's closer to 10 minutes every other game, and he's handling the decreased workload about as well as you can expect. I mean, don't get me wrong, he sucks, but he hasn't been our undoing like he was with the Pens.
Scuderi didn't really replace Daley's roster spot, though: that went to a guy named Erik Gustafsson, a 2012 draft pick of the beleaguered Edmonton Oilers who didn't sign him before their draft rights expired in the summer of '14. Again, the Bowmans cover Sweden like paper over rock, so of course they got him this summer, played him in Rockford for a little bit, and called him up after a short period of impressing at the AHL level. He's an offensive defenseman but much more focused than Daley ever was, and much closer to the much-missed Johnny Oduya. Trevor van Riemsdyk was signed out of the NCAA rather than drafted, and he's basically just a competent heady 5th/6th defenseman who will get lit up when overexposed in road games. Committed Indian guys hate him too, but he's fine if you keep him around his ceiling. He's still played very few NHL games. Michal Rozsival has played many NHL games and rotates with Scuderi at #6. Also, David Rundblad was a defenseman from Sweden who turned out to be as useless as could be. He was loaned to a Swedish team just to get his worthless ass out. We no longer carry a #8 defenseman. With this optimization of our blue line, the team won 12 games in a row.
Scott Darling is now the full-time backup for Crawford after wowing last year in limited appearances, but due to a Vezina-level year from Crawford and a sophomore slump, is pretty much restricted to ass ends of back-to-backs, and not even always then if it's a road game and the opponent isn't that much weaker (read: I wouldn't be so sure he starts against the Panthers). He has an amazing story wherein he drank his way out of college hockey and numerous NHL organizations, eventually having to claw his way back up from whatever ghastly sort of enterprise would station a hockey team in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He finally got some quality coaching with the Milwaukee Admirals (Nashville affiliate), signed with Rockford last year, saved Crawford's ass both when he got drunk and fell down the stairs and when he couldn't stop shit in the first round of the playoffs, the rest is history. Goaltending is a weak spot in the organization, so if he can't hack it this year, there's really no one to replace him.
There are a bunch of guys who have gotten looks and gone back down to RFD. They're not really worth mentioning at the moment.
This long effort post has been donated to CSFMB in loving memory of sinicalypse.
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