Game Recap: Golden Knights 5 — Blackhawks 2
Three takeaways from last night's Chicago Blackhawks loss to the Vegas Golden Knights.
Teams across the NHL are going to take a few games to get into the swing of things after a shortened preseason. That's certainly going to be the case for the Chicago Blackhawks after a defensively awful 5-2 loss against the Vegas Golden Knights. Jeff Blashill rolled with a new untested lineup ahead of the season opener, and they played sloppy hockey and lacked cohesion in all three zones.
We'll forgo the planned deep dive analysis and keep this recap short and tight. Here are a few trends that we hope Chicago can erase early on in the season.
1 — Ineffective Zone Entries
Under first-time NHL coach Ryan Craig, the Vegas Golden Knights ran with a mostly unchanged tactical structure from their successful run to the Stanley Cup Final last season. Vegas defended zone entries with a very compact defense that stifled Chicago's offense.
The Blackhawks ' offense quickly wilted under pressure upon entry into the offensive zone. The few good looks they had were generated because they utilized the stretch pass, speed, and neutral zone turnovers.
Chicago's offense generated a 29.76% expected goals share (xG%) through the first two periods before Vegas sat back to protect a lead in the third period, where the Hawks had a 71.51 xG%.
2 — Woeful Breakouts
I was surprised to see that the Hawks' worst period in terms of shot attempt share was only 41.18%. It felt like Vegas' forecheck and the Hawks' prolonged time in the defensive zone would have made their shot attempt share much lower.
Defensive zone retrievals were painful to watch as players struggled to collect pucks under pressure and connect tape-to-tape passes. Artyom Levshunov led the team with four giveaways.
3 — Man-on-Man Defense
The Blackhawks' poor defensive play began with loose gaps at the blueline. Once Vegas was able to gain entry, they wore out Chicago with long shifts, who were unable to win puck battles. Long shifts in the DZ led to exhaustion, which compounded mistakes, and mistakes turned into clear paths to the net.
Trever Connelly scores his first NHL goal.
Despite Spencer Knight's spectacular performance (stopping six of eight high danger scoring chances at 5v5), the Hawks defense cannot rely on his heroics every night.
My concern is that these are the same trends that we saw last season. While one game is an incredibly small sample size, this was not a step in the right direction.
Stats are from NaturalStatTrick.com.
