One positive effect of growing older and taking in more sports seasons is that I find it less and less necessary to overreact to individual games. This is even true with the NFL, with its relatively small 17-game sample of a regular season that can make each game feel like a referendum on every player and coach and executive involved with a franchise. Regular season NHL games never feel quite as important, given the 82-game schedule and lack of five or six-day stretches between games. Preseason ones? Even less so.
I offer that as a caveat, because the words that are going to follow could very much be a short-sighted overreaction to a freaking preseason game but we’re going down this road anyway, because even a night to think it over has left me struggling to ignore what we (OK, maybe a very small few of us) witnessed during the Blackhawks preseason opener against Detroit on Tuesday night.
A 3-2 loss would be easy to brush aside in most preseason outings, but deeper analysis brings out the context that’s making it difficult to shrug off. Detroit — a team that’s been mostly garbage for about a decade now — sent out a roster loaded with future AHL skaters for this game, holding back top players like Dylan Larkin and Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat and Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider. Chicago didn’t quite send it’s “A” team but it was pretty close: Connor Bedard was there. So were Frank Nazar, Sam Rinzel, Artyom Levshunov, Kevin Korchinski and Oliver Moore. Virtually all of those guys are going to be with Chicago this season and several of them are expected to handle significant roles.
And what happened? Let’s bring back the first bullet point from Tuesday’s recap one more time:
The Blackhawks were outshot FORTY-THREE to SEVENTEEN in this game despite the Red Wings icing a largely AHL roster and Chicago having a more representative sample of what its expected NHL roster. This wasn’t just a symptom of Detroit having five power plays to Chicago’s three, either. At 5-on-5 play, the Red Wings had decisive advantages everywhere: 46-23 in shot attempts, 32-14 in shots on goal, 22-11 in scoring chances and 13-7 in high-danger chances, all for a whopping 71.29 percent share of the expected goals.
Not great!
The context creates the issue here. The Blackhawks sent a roster full of its expected NHLers to play against a roster of largely future AHLers and were outplayed in a manner that felt all too familiar for anyone who’s watched this team for the last several seasons.
New coach Jeff Blashill offered a perfectly reasonable explanation for why that happened:
Jeff Blashill on tonight's Blackhawks loss:
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) September 24, 2025
"Everything is new, systems are new, and we played like we were thinking. When you think a lot, you play slow. They beat us to pretty much every loose puck…"
"It didn't surprise me. I knew we were going to be tired and our systems…
In a vacuum, yes: that all makes perfect sense. But that is not where this team resides.
It resides in a place with ZERO equity for all parties involved: the players, the front office and even the new coach. It’s been miserable to watch this team for almost a decade now and there are no games in recent memory that can be offered as comfort that things will turn around in the future. Even the players with the most promise still have much left to prove. How high Bedard’s ceiling will end up reaching remains a question mark. Nazar now has the burden of a new contract with expectations to be met. Rinzel needs to prove his mettle beyond a nine-game sample at the end of a season. And those three players could all become stars and this team could still be terrible again.
This team is going to be considered one of the worst in the league — if not THE worst — until it proves that it is not through the very obvious remedy of winning games. The burden of proof is on them. And our first batch of evidence offered virtually no hope that those victories are on the horizon. Instead, it just looked like more of the same for a team that’s allegedly taking a step forward.
For a second consecutive season, Kyle Davidson has declared he expects the Blackhawks to take a step forward.
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) September 18, 2025
"It’s our belief that…that youth is going to start propelling us forward."
New story analyzing that and more from Day 1 of training camp: https://t.co/FljdlhH4Ey