Blackhawks: Impressive defeat of one of the league’s best teams

The Chicago Blackhawks are one of the most inconsistent teams in the NHL because they’ll lose to a lower level team but beat the elite teams.

The Chicago Blackhawks are not a very good hockey team. What makes a good hockey team is one that wins more than they lose and they do not do that. What makes it so frustrating is that they are good against the league’s best teams and not so good against the lower level teams. The New Jersey Devils are last in the Metropolitan Division and they came to Chicago and beat the Blackhawks 7-1. Last night, the New York Islanders, who are third in the entire Eastern Conference, came to Chicago and were defeated pretty handily.

It was at least a solid defeat on the scoreboard. The Islanders outshot the Hawks 40-30. That is usually not good but Robin Lehner went in there and shut down his old team. He played well in the 5-2 win and made all the saves he needed to. They also got contributions from their stars in Jonathan Toews, Alex DeBrincat, and Patrick Kane along with some depth scoring. Matthew Highmore scored his first of the season and Dennis Gilbert scored his first career goal.

The Islanders and Blackhawks have a very contrasting play style. The Islanders have adopted their coach Barry Trotz’s system since he took over last year. They trap it up and make it difficult for teams to create offense. They create offense by pouncing on mistakes made by their opponents. The thing about this game is that the Blackhawks got a lead on them in the first period and forced New York to play a game they’re not used to as much. It is hard to sit back and defend when you’re losing so getting the lead was huge.

The Blackhawks went down 1-0 before managing to get the lead. They could have easily let the Islanders do what they do best at that point but they didn’t give up. It was good to see because a lot of teams fold when they go down early to the Islanders. They even chased out Thomas Greiss for Semyon Varlamov. It is very hard to get the Islanders goalies to play bad but they didn’t look like themselves. The team that had given up the least amount of goals in the entire league going into the game gave up five to the Hawks.

Hopefully, they can keep this going. They are going to Ohio to play the Columbus Blue Jackets on Sunday evening. This is another chance against a weaker team to get some momentum going. They need to play at the same battle level against the teams lower in the standings as they do the ones who are up there. This was an impressive win and hopefully the keep it going.