Blue and Yellow: Blackhawks at Mammoth Preview

Minimal rest is available to the Hawks this weekend as they head to Salt Lake City this afternoon for a game against the Utah Mammoth.

These two teams will become quite familiar with each other in March, as they’ll play three times in the next two weeks to account for 75 percent of their meeting this season. The other 25 percent came back in October when the Hawks won 3-1 at the United Center for their first win of the season. Since then, a youthful Utah lineup has worked its way into postseason discussions, entering this game in the top wild card spot with 66 points in 59 games, just ahead of Seattle’s 65 in 59. With the three top Central Division teams (Colorado, Dallas, Minnesota) all at or past 80 points, Utah is all but guaranteed to be a wild card team should it make the postseason and they own a mild lead over the two teams just outside of the wild card picture in Nashville and LA, both with 62 points in 59 games.

The Mammoth’s play is driven by a group of players virtually all under the age of 30, with only old friend Nick Schmaltz entering his third decade on this planet as of last week. He’s second on the team with 55 points (23 G, 32 A) in 59 games while captain Clayton Keller leads the way with 58 in 59 (18 G, 40 A). Additional scoring depth comes from forwards like Dylan Guenther (49 in 59), JJ Peterka (38 in 55) and Lawson Crouse (31 in 68) while the blue line is paced by Mikhail Sergachev (41 in 59, 24:26 ATOI) and John Marino (28 in 59, 20:24 ATOI). Those skaters have helped Utah reach top-5 rankings in both quantity of possession (53.11 percent share of shot attempts, 4th in the league) and quality of possession (53.58 percent share of expected goals, 5th), which suggests it’ll have the puck far more often than the Hawks in this game. In net, Karel Vejmelka has been pretty good (28-15-2 record, .901 save percentage, 2.60 goals-against average) as well.

Utah has won three of its last four, part of a 2026 trend that’s seen the team cement its playoff standing with a 13-5-1 record since the calendar flipped. And the Mammoth had Saturday off, too. So the Hawks are facing a team playing consistently well for the last few months while on the tail end of a back-to-back. Not exactly a favorable set of circumstances for this game, eh?

Here was the most recent Mammoth lineup:

As for the Hawks, they’ve lost three in a row and have just a single victory in their last nine games (1-6-2). Any exploration of the current situation can quickly devolve into a pessimistic glance towards the future, so let’s not do all of that here and instead hope for some sort of bounce-back performance against the Mammoth this afternoon. Below is the lineup from Saturday’s loss in Colorado, with possible adjustments coming on the blue line if Sam Rinzel is healthy enough to return along with an anticipated goalie switch.

Blackhawks lineup in warmups Greene-Bedard-Burakovsky Moore-Nazar-Teräväinen Bertuzzi-Dickinson-Mikheyev Donato-Foligno-Dach Vlasic-Crevier Grzelcyk-Levshunov Korchinski-Murphy Knight Söderblom

— Scott Powers (@scottpowers.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 4:37 PM

Let’s go Hawks.

Tale of the Tape

Blackhawks — Statistic — Mammoth
46.34% (29th) — 5-on-5 Corsi For — 53.11% (4th)
43.96% (32nd) — 5-on-5 Expected goals for — 53.58% (5th)
2.61 (26th) — Goals per game — 3.22 (14th)
3.17 (t-21st) — Goals against per game — 2.76 (5th)
47.0% (30th) — Faceoffs — 49.4% (20th)
19.2% (21st) — Power play — 16.1% (t-27th)
85.6% (1st) — Penalty kill — 78.7% (20th)
(All stats from this season)