Topeka, Orange Is The New Suck

Spraying bullets about the Hawks and Panthers, and getting set up for the Hawks matinee (it's too goddamn early in the season for matinees) in Philly on Saturday.

Sector 1901 - Topeka

Like we said, fear of embarrassment plus a team not paying full attention can sometimes lead to surprise results. The Hawks got one over the Panthers last night, and the Hawks probably needed it. One suspects that the Panthers may have come down with a case of "Chicago flu," but they're hardly the first and won't be the last. They certainly played like it, and had Paul Maurice lighting into them at the first TV timeout.

Was it perfect? No, far from it. But then it's never going to be given where the Hawks are. Let's get through it.

Luke Richardson would really like the Hawks to play like the Panthers. That's a stupid statement on the surface, admittedly, because every team wants to do stuff like the defending champions. But the way the Panthers d-men are constantly on top of forwards in the offensive zone when the opposing team is trying to break out is a tenet that Richardson has mentioned repeatedly before. Sadly for Richardson, the Hawks blue line just isn't mobile enough to do it right now. Especially with Seth Jones in the freezer. When the likes of T.J. Brodie are attempting it, it ends with Wyatt Kaiser frantically sprinting across the neutral zone to try and prevent a 2-on-1.

Whenever the Hawks tried to get out, be it up the strong-side boards or a ring around to the weak-side, the Hawks winger on the wall had a Panthers d-man pretty much giving him a prostate exam every single time. It's how the Panthers wear teams down. To get out of that jam a winger has to either hold the puck up under serious pressure and wait for an option, or make a one touch pass to someone moving at speed. They don't have the skill for the latter, nor the forwards for the former.

For the last 40 minutes, I think the Hawks managed to break out successfully once, and that was through Alex Vlasic.

Vlasic popped this puck out first time to Reichel on the move at the circle there. He might be the only player on the roster capable of this.

We can't go much further without addressing the Bedard-sized elephant in the room. Going a whole game without a shot-attempt is not acceptable on any plane. Nor is the position that Richardson has put him in. Ray Ferraro was harping on this during the broadcast, and it really is malfeasance for Bedard to have to matchup, at home, with Sasha Barkov's line all night. This is the pickle Richardson backed himself into by putting him on Jason Dickinson's wing. Because there's no other center on the roster who can face up to the likes of Barkov.

This isn't a quote that's helping:

Yeah, you know what? I don't give a fuck what Bedard is doing in the defensive end. You shouldn't give a fuck what Bedard is doing in the defensive end. And most importantly, the Hawks shouldn't give a fuck right now what Bedard is doing in the defensive end. He's here because he's supposed to be a generational scorer. There'll come a time when he can hone his defensive game. We know he will when it arrives. He's a workaholic.

But it is not now, and this isn't helping anyone, especially Bedard. Get him back to center, way the fuck away from Joey Goddamn Anderson, tell him to fuck shit up in the offensive zone and not worry about anything else. Especially how he's playing defense on the goddamn wing, which shouldn't be applicable to anything that happens in any future that matters.

At least his gravity still means something. Teuvo's power play goal was all a result of defenses still being pulled to Bedard.

Right before Teuvo makes this pass to Bertuzzi on the goal line, both Forsling and Ekblad have looked over to see Bedard curling back into a shooting position. They expect the pass to go back there and are getting ready to jump out to block that lane. So it's not a total loss at the moment. But being a decoy wasn't the point of this season. At least it had better not be.

This is how a coach who's supposed to be strong on development gets fired.

I went Defcon 5 when Emily Kaplan used the word "overripen" when describing the Hawks handling for Frank Nazar. Remember what organization used that word excessively? You do, don't you? It was Detroit back in the 2010s. They told us how they just love for their prospects to "overripen" in Grand Rapids. That they knew better than everyone else and they felt no need to get their prospects to Joe Louis until they were past ready. And everyone took their word for it because they were the Red Wings and they couldn't possibly fuck up.

Yeah, well, it turned out that the likes of Tomas Jurco and Riley Sheahan and Xavier Ouellet and Martin Frk just couldn't fucking play. There's no threat of that with Nazar, and probably a couple others the Hawks are or will artificially hold back. But the idea of "overripen" or "over marinate" is Grade A horseshit. It's an excuse to elongate a timeline so no one's job is under any pressure.

All right, that's enough of that. Let's pivot to what's ahead.

Hawks Gameday - Remedial Study Session

Philadelphia Flyers Lineup

Tippett - Couturier - Konecny

Farabee - Laughton - Brink

Richard - Cates - Michkov

Foerster - Poehling - Hathaway

Sanheim - Ristolainen

Seeler - Johnson

Zamula - Grans

Fedotov/Kolosov

What You Need To Know: The Hawks get to face a team that might be as bad as them! Though that didn't go all that well on Tuesday against Anaheim, did it? Well, shit.

The Flyers are one of a handful of teams that are trying to do the full reset/rebuild, but don't have the centerpiece to build it all around. Whereas the Hawks are the opposite, as they do have the centerpiece the just refuse to put anything around him until society collapses (which admittedly is a rapidly approaching date now). Oh and now that centerpiece is a checking winger. There's a halfway decent collection of young players here, but it also doesn't feel like there's much of a direction or enough to amount to anything you'll notice in three or four years.

That centerpiece is supposed to be Matvei Michkov, and maybe it will be one day soon. Right now, John Tortorella has him on the third line, though he's close to a point-per-game anyway. There are some serious hands here and a nose for the net. Though how much he's going to show that off playing with the likes of Noah Cates is a mystery. Michkov is only averaging 0.45 ixG/60, which is just about half of what Bedard is averaging playing with similar garbage. There was talk a couple years ago that Michkov might have stolen the #1 pick status from Bedard had there not been questions about when exactly he was going to leave the KHL to come ashore. Arriving this summer was something of a surprise.

But what exactly goes with Michkov? Bobby Brink had a gaudy sophomore season at Denver a few years back, but hasn't really flashed at the top level yet. Travis Konecny is already 27, even with is breakout season so far. Is he going to be the same player whenever the Flyers are making serious noise again? Owen Tippett and Joel Farabee are 25 and 24, respectively, which is better but again, they're gong to be 28 or 29 when the Flyers would seem to be aimed for. That's kind of already post-peak.

Cam York and Jamie Drysdale are supposed to be the young hopefuls on the blue line, though both are currently hurt. Yegor Zamula? Not likely.

The Flyers may have gotten fooled, just a bit, by their passing fancy at a playoff spot last season that predictably fell short. They didn't go hog wild about it at least, and still sold at the deadline by punting Sean Walker overboard. Still, getting within hailing distance of the playoffs the previous season makes it a a little awkward when a team returns to its rightful place on its rebuilding arc.

Whatever the timeline, whatever the direction, the current version of the Flyers is a mess. They have some of the worst metrics in the league, are defensively abhorrent, and their offense is actually somewhere around the Hawks at even-strength (2.14 xGF/60 vs Chicago's 2.2). If it wasn't for Konecny shooting the lights out so far this season (19% shooting-percentage), the Flyers might be in the basement.

Much like the Hawks, the Flyers appear to be trying to solve their long-term goaltending through numbers, with Fedotov, Kolosov, and Ersson all getting cracks (though Ersson is hurt, opening up chances for Kolosov). None of them have been particularly good, either.

Much like on Tuesday, the Hawks will be facing a team that would be a top pick to help them solve their offensive woes. The Flyers give up anything in their own zone, and they don't even have the puck-pushers from the back that the Ducks have. They probably can't turn up the speed to a level the Hawks can't play at. Unless they let Konecny off the chain, they're also not really explosive from anywhere else in the lineup. It won't be a great advertisement for the sport or league, and will probably qualify in that oh-so-precious category of "competitive," such as the Hawks organization defines it.