Chicago’s road woes continued on Wednesday night in a 6-2 loss to the Seattle Kraken.
Early on, Seattle’s leading goal scorer added to his team-high total with Jared McCann tallying at the 4:34 mark of the opening period:
A few minutes later, Jaden Schwartz scored the epitome of a “right place, right time” goal when this puck bounced into the net off of his leg:
The first period ended on a positive note for Chicago, though, when Joey Anderson redirected a Seth Jones’ point shot into the Seattle goal:
But any momentum from the goal near the end of the first period disappeared 15 seconds into the second period when this horrendously unlucky moment resulted in a 3-1 Seattle lead:
Alexander Wennberg was awarded that goal. Near the end of the second, Brandon Tanev was credited for a goal that he actually scored, making it a 4-1 game:
Early in the third, Chicago was on the power play and Nick Foligno scored the goal but the real highlight here is the Philipp Kurashev pass:
A wild sequence put this game to bed. Ryan Donato was denied on a breakaway at one end, before Tomas Tatar scored on his breakaway at the other end:
Tatar added a second goal later in the third to pad his stats a bit more and account for the final goal of the evening. We’re up to 18 road losses in a row now. What a time to be alive.
Notes
- Up first, an apology: one of the topics during this evening’s recording of the Musings on Madison podcast was all about how good Alex Vlasic has been this season. So, of course, we’re all to blame for everything that went wrong for him in this game. We apologize and we’ll do better next time.
- In spite of all that, he and Seth Jones had the best possession numbers among Chicago’s D pairings and two of the four goals scored while Vlasic was on the ice were fluky ones that are not indicative of how they played. Feels like that Vlasic/Jones pairing is going to be Chicago’s de facto No. 1 pairing for the rest of the season.
- All of the nice things that can be said about the Vlasic/Jones pairing can not be said about the Korchinski/Megna pairing. That duo had only played together for 32:19 of 5-on-5 ice time prior to this game and the possession numbers were decent (50-50 in shot attempts, 54 percent share of expected goals), so maybe it was just an off night. But those two skated 15:43 together at 5-on-5 in this game and were underwater in shot attempts (21-10), shots on goal (7-5), scoring chances (12-7) and high-danger scoring chances (7-1), all while starting in the offensive zone 62.5 percent of the time.
- When Bedard was healthy, the main point of every game was waiting for him to do something cool. In his absence, Kurashev was happy to provide that moment with that wonderful primary assist on Foligno’s goal.
- Later in the second period, there was some brief discussion on the broadcast, spearheaded by Edzo, about how the Blackhawks went from drafting “smaller, softer” defensemen under the prior regime (aka Stan Bowman) to drafting bigger defensemen like Alex Vlasic and Louis Crevier under the current regime (aka Kyle Davidson). The only issue there is that Vlasic was drafted in 2019, Crevier in 2020 — which makes them both Bowman picks. What’s Edzo getting at there?
- Want to see something hilarious? (It’s the second of the tweets below, which came during the third period)
- As for the first part of that tweet, Lazerus was not the only one to express similar sentiment on Twitter during this game and it’s a fair criticism of Soderblom’s performance. The aforementioned goals via fluky bounces can hardly be held against him, although that likely doesn’t help his confidence. But there’s also something to be said for a goalie rising to an occasion in a key moment, such as facing a breakaway moments after one of your teammates failed to score on a breakaway of their own. That’s probably more of a graduate-level course in Soderblom’s goaltending education, though, and he’s still working his way through the prerequisites.
- One game closer to the return of Connor Bedard. That’ll be a good day, when it gets here.
Game Charts
Three Stars
- Tomas Tatar (SEA) — 2 goals
- Jordan Eberle (SEA) — 2 assists
- Joey Daccord (SEA) — 33 saves on 35 shots
What’s Next
The Blackhawks head across the border to face the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday night at 8 p.m. Oh, and the Oilers have won 14 games in a row. Buckle up.