Indeed, look how conspicuous some of these underperformers are when Jonathan Toews is off the ice.  For instance, Brian Campbell has always been a bumbler (at least with the Hawks), but how much more so now that Tazer isn’t there to pick up  the slack of his teammates’ bad passes, turnovers, and other bumblings?  How much more apparent is Dustin Byfuglien’s bad skating when on an opponent’s breakaway, big, bumbling Buff is left in the dust, which, in last night’s loss to the Avalanche at least, resulted in an avoidable goal.

And Ben Eager.  Well, clearly we haven’t been giving this boy his due.  In Eager’s absence is Colin Fraser seriously expected to act as enforcer???  I give Fraser snaps for trying, but please Ben Eager, eat your spinach, take your vitamins, and get back soon! (Or better yet, let’s travel back in time and re-sign Matt Walker who was an excellent, if uncredited, enforcer.)

Additionally, and as Sassone alluded to — Jordan Hendry, John Madden, Andrew Ebbett, Tomas Kopecky, and Jake Dowell — ain’t cuttin’ it.  The only newbie I see hustling out there is Niklas Hjalmarsson.  He’s so busy, he’s running circles, literally, around other defensemen like Brian Campbell and Cam Barker.  The Hammer is going to hammer himself out if he doesn’t get some help out there, and soon!

And the power-play unit.  Just the mere mention of it makes my stomach turn.  While the Hawks scored once on the power play last night, I think it is obvious even to the most casual hockey fan that there needs to be some vast improvement there.

The Hawks have had a fairly light schedule so far.  So does anyone really see them staying atop the division if they continue on like this?  Everyone knows the boys from Rockford are hungrier because they don’t have cushy multi-million dollar contracts to fall back on.  It’s play well or get out.  So, bringing up some eager beavers from Rockford might wake some of these Hawks up and make them realize their jobs aren’t guaranteed.

It was like both teams had taken Ambien and were sleep walking through the game.  They were slow.  I mean, slooooooow.  You can’t really blame the Hawks.  Why expend more energy than you have to to beat such a lousy team? And the Wild are lousy, at least on the road.  Even Patrick Kane was able to score a goal in the 3rd period, unassisted at that. (Other goals were scored for the Hawks by Dave Bolland and Troy Brouwer, both in the 1st period.)

Watching for the bad calls was the only thing keeping the crowd lively.  At times you could hear a pin drop in the UC.  It was eerily quiet.  Even the fight between the Wild’s Shane Hnidy and the Hawks’ Jake Dowell in the 1st period was blah.  No sooner had they gotten going at each other and the refs were breaking it up (which elicited a resounding, collective boo from Hawks fans), even though neither Hnidy or Dowell had put the other on the ice. And for that little go-around, Hnidy and Dowell got a 5-minute major penalty!  Similarly, in the 2nd period, the ref would independently call boarding on both the Wild’s Cal Clutterbuck and the Hawks’ Tomas Kopecky; both were minor penalties which indicated the hits were no big deal and certainly not severe enough to necessitate a boarding call.  If you blinked, you would have missed it.  I love it when refs try to phase out fighting or what they deem questionable hits by excessively penalizing them.  Yeah, because we don’t know what they’re doing.  Tonight’s game illustrates, at least in one way, why fighting in hockey is necessary.  It picks up an otherwise dreary game.  (And mad props go to the Hawks’ penalty-kill unit tonight.  They were mighty busy.)

Other of tonight’s calls that left us all scratching our heads came in the 3rd period when the Wild’s Benoit Pouliot was called for diving and the Hawks’ Cam Barker was called for interference. Even the scoreboard keeper was confused at those “penalties.”  The scoreboard at first called Cam Barker’s “interference” as “roughing.”  Hey, the statisticians’ guesses were as good as ours because we didn’t see Benoit Pouliot embellishing and we sure as hell didn’t see Cam Barker interfere. We did see Pouliot tripping, which came on the heels of another missed tripping call that should’ve been on the Wild, but how a ref could get diving out of that I don’t know. Perhaps the weirdest call of the night, at least against the Wild, was on goaltender Niklas Backstrom who was called for slashing in the 2nd period. <shrug>  It was about this time that the fans started realizing that the refs were just pulling calls out of their cracks…or they were smoking crack.  Something having to do with a whole lot of crack.

Overall, it was a weird game.  The refs must have been high and the players were in a funk, but the fans were in rare form.  Indeed, many wore their old Martin Havlat sweaters as if to say thank you to Havi for last season.  One fan even pointed to the ‘24′ on his Havlat sweater when he made it on the jumbotron.  That’s what’s great about Hawks fans.  Unlike other fans from other teams, we honor our former players.

Final score: Hawks win 3-1 against the Wild in a very strange game.