Hawks Hockey Hoiden

It was good to see former Blackhawk James “The Wiz” Wisniewski, even if he was playing for the bad guys (the Ducks), though he was more of a blur.  The Ducks were really amped up and played a very fast game; so fast the Hawks were having trouble keeping up on the way back to their defensive zone!

The Hawks were also having a dilly of a pickle of a time getting any traction on the ice.  I’ve noticed this a lot in the last several games.  The ice seems to be either too soft and therefore a wet, sloppy mess, or not soft enough, causing frequent wipeouts.  Don’t know what that’s about, but the Hawks were clearly having trouble.

The Hawks’ penalty-kill unit was also having a tough go.  They let down their guard, a rarity, which led to the Ducks’ Teemu Selanne scoring a goal late in the 1st period, and a goal at about the midway point in the game.

Also at the midway point, Dustin Byfuglien had an incidental collision with James Wisniewski wherein Byfuglien accidentally tripped and took out the Duck’s goal tender, Jean-Sebastien Giguere.  Unfortunately, Byfuglien was hit with an interference on a goal keeper penalty.   And though Giguere took a big swing at Byfuglien, not a Duck was cited for a penalty. Worse, on the resulting power play, the Ducks’ Nick Boynton scored another goal, putting another dent in the Hawks’ penalty-kill percentage.

Byfuglien would get a little revenge of sorts when, after serving his time in the sin bin, he came out and put some snow in Giguere’s face.  As a result, former Hawk James Wisniewski went at Big Buff in a slight scrap. And yeah, it’s always a little sad when former teammates go at each other, but it’s understandable on Wiz’s part since Buff has become something of a goal-tender agitator.  Perhaps Buff should focus instead on his skating and stick-handling since he has appeared in the last few games to be bumbling badly.

In addition to Byfuglien’s bad performance, the whole team just fell down, which resulted in a win for the Ducks in a 3 to 0 shutout.  There was bad passing, too many turnovers, lackadaisical skating, a penalty-kill unit that hardly showed up, a horrible whiff in the 3rd period by Brian Campbell on a nearly wide-open net, needless penalties, and I don’t know that the Hawks ever got a single rebound.  Not to mention that the Hawks got totally outskated.  What?  Did the Hawks have too much turkey yesterday?  Were they in a tryptophan coma?  Well, whatever it was, hopefully they shake it off by tomorrow’s game against the Kings.

On a more whimsical note, Comcast finally interviewed Niklas Hjalmarsson. During the first intermission, Eddie Olczyk asked how Hjalmarsson was able to block so many shots. (Hjalmy leads the Hawks in blocked shots.)  Hjalmy said,

“I guess I like the pain.  The puck just seems to hit me…It’s kind of my role to do those things instead of scoring goals… I just try to do those small things really good.”

Mission accomplished Nik.  And as an aside, Hjalmarsson’s long-awaited “One Goal” commercial debuted today.  In it, Hjalmarsson paired up with IKEA apparently, and went around the store pronouncing all the Swedish names of the furniture (and the word “meatball,” you know, in case you didn’t know how to pronounce “meatball”).  Then he said, “My goal is to help Chicago appreciate Swedish imports.”  Well, we can certainly appreciate Hjalmarsson, and we have since the playoffs last year.  In time, he will no doubt become one of the superstars of the game.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Brian Campbell, Chicago Blackhawks, Dustin Byfuglien, Eddie Olczyk, Niklas Hjalmarsson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.