Tonight the Blackhawks are back at the Madhouse on Madison as they face the Dallas Stars for their home opener. After avoiding a Dallas shutout by seconds in the season opener – literally, Nick Leddy scored with 13.6 seconds left in regulation – the Hawks need to find a lucky horseshoe because they weren’t getting any breaks last night.

Here we find Jamie Benn smashing Niklas Hjalmarsson and breaking glass in the third period
Stars’ goalie Lehtonen was rather flawless stopping 37 shots, tonight probably won’t be much different. The Hawks out-shot the Stars 22-12 in the second period, but somehow the Stars came out with 2 goals and the Hawks had nada.
With one game down, there were a few things I noticed about the young (excluding O’Donnell) Blackhawks team.
- Duncan Keith needs to be a bit more aggressive, if you’re going to run this defense you need to have a little pep in your step on the ice. We like to see some checking!
- If the first period of this game was a representation of how Corey Crawford will play this year, hellooo playoffs!
- Quenneville just needs to define his lines, see what works best under the pressure of the regular season – I feel like there was quite a bit of clumsy wipeouts, more than usual.
- Brent Seabrook and I are still not dating, this is a huge disadvantage for their upcoming season.