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Keep it on Wax: Maple Leafs 4, Blackhawks 1

Posted on by Dave Melton
Credit: John E. Sokolowski-Imagn Images

The Blackhawks lost their third straight game and seventh of the last nine with a 3-1 defeat on the road against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Monday night.

The Leafs grabbed an early lead that they’d never relinquish when Auston Matthews found open space in the Chicago zone and took in a neat saucer pass from William Nylander for a mini-breakaway that resulted in a goal:

The first ended 1-0 and Chicago controlled the play for much of the second but the lone goal went to the Maple Leafs thanks to this tough-luck bounce that found its way into the Blackhawks net:

Chicago briefly made it a one-goal game when the young Jedi picked up a loose pick and flipped it into an empty net at the end of a helter-skelter sequence in the Toronto end:

In an all-too-worrying trend, the Blackhawks gave up a goal just 21 seconds later to make it a 3-1 game again after a point shot pinballed around, eventually onto the stick of Fraser Minten:

The Hawks had a late power play that yielded nothing, and a Matthew Knies empty-net goal put the game away for good.

Notes

This whole trend of the Blackhawks giving up a goal soon after scoring one of their own? Not a fan.

The Hawks give up a goal :21 after scoring. Yesterday, they gave up goals to CBJ 1:26, 1:50, and 2:44 after scoring. They also had their checking line on the ice vs Toronto's 3rd line.

— Jay Zawaski (@jayzawaski.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 8:37 PM

That first Toronto goal can largely be chalked up to Nolan Allan over-committing to his left, leaving a wide-open path to the net for Matthews, who probably couldn’t believe how much time and space he had.

Outside of that miscue leading to a goal and the poor timing of the third goal against, it’s hard to overstate how much the Blackhawks controlled the play of this game. In the 47:45 of 5-on-5 ice time in this game, Chicago had a 26-17 advantage in shots on goal, 54-25 advantage in shot attempts, 28-16 advantage in scoring chances, 14-8 advantage in high-danger chances and a 71.49 percent expected goal share that was the Blackhawks second-best mark of the season. And they lost.

Blackhawks lose 4-1.

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— Mark Lazerus (@marklazerus.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 9:02 PM

But this also feels like a symptom of the rampant inconsistency we’ve seen from this Blackhawks team for several seasons now. It’s easy to find the motivation and the effort to put together a performance like this when it’s against an Original Six team on the road in one of the more lively buildings in the NHL. But this team isn’t going to go anywhere until it can find a way to locate similar amounts of fucks to give when it’s facing a teams alongside it near the bottom of the NHL standings. Until they do, near — or at! — the bottom of the NHL standings is where they’ll remain.

Connor Bedard did not have a shot on goal in this game and Natural Stat Trick data had him with just two shot attempts during his 13:07 of 5-on-5 ice time. That’s just not going to work. He was mostly out against the Holmberg-Tavares-Marner lined backed by Chris Tanev and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, which is to say it wasn’t an impossible assignment.

It’s not a perfect metric, but it’s interesting to look at NST’s Individual Expected Goals Per 60 (ixG/60) and see where Bedard is. Right now, he’s fourth on the Blackhawks at 0.71 (Ryan Donato is first at 1.1, and LUKAS REICHEL! is second at 0.85). Last season, Bedard was best on the team at 0.9. Again, not a perfect stat, but there’s a statistical drop in the amount of shots and chances he’s generating leading to his overall decline in production. It feels like the process isn’t working for Bedard and the results won’t be arriving until that is fixed. One goal against Dallas won’t cut it.

Here’s where I’d love to tell you about moral victories or how nice it was to see the Hawks give such a strong effort against a top team like Toronto and how efforts like this will certainly be rewarded if they can manage to do the same thing against inferior teams but … we’ve been trying to grasp at those straws for, what? Seven or eight seasons now? Some of that predates the current regime but there’s just been this constant stream of disappointment in so many ways for so many years that there’s nothing to be salvaged here because it feels extremely likely that this Chicago same time will regress in just 48 hours and get woefully outshot and outchanced — and probably outscored — by the middle-of-the-pack Boston team that’ll be at the United Center on Wednesday night. And so it’ll go on from there, over and over, world without end, Amen.

Game Charts

Three Stars

  1. Anthony Stolarz (TOR) — 27 saves on 28 shots
  2. Auston Matthews (TOR) — 1 goal
  3. Young Jedi (CHI) — 1 goal

What’s Next

The Blackhawks return home to host the Boston Bruins at the United Center on Wednesday night at 6:30 p.m.

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