From Roller Hockey to a Stanley Cup: How Pat Maroon Is ‘Driving the Bus’ for the Lightning
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Today’s News Clips Nov. 21, 2019 Chicago Tribune Column: Resurgent Blackhawks are a more serious playoff contender with 18- year-old Kirby Dach David Haugh Nov. 20, 2019 Fourth-line centers routinely do hockey’s dirty work, so Kirby Dach willingly accepts whatever chores come with living in Blackhawks teammate Brent Seabrook’s basement. “Usually loading the dishwasher and laundry,’’ Dach said with a laugh. He is 18 going on 40, oozing maturity that makes Dach an ideal fit on a Hawks team led by Jonathan “Captain Serious” Toews. Dach still misses his parents and younger brother and sister back home in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, but finds comfort living among the happy chaos in the Seabrook household with three kids under 6 and the family’s three dogs. “It’s like the way I grew up,’’ he said. He loves everything about his bustling new city except its traffic, which he seldom encountered in a rural Canadian community with a population of 26,492. On Wednesday, Dach will celebrate the one-month anniversary of his NHL debut, forever etched in his memory after lining up across from Capitals legends Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. “That was surreal,’’ Dach said. Just as jaw-dropping has been Dach’s instant impact. Entering Tuesday’s game against the Hurricanes, Dach had scored five goals and totaled nine points in 14 games averaging just 11:13 minutes on the ice. The kid belongs. Only three other 18-year-olds besides Dach ever have enjoyed a point streak of four or more games. And only Devils forward Jack Hughes, the No. 1 pick of last June’s NHL draft, has scored more points among rookies than the player the Hawks selected two spots later. A preseason concussion delayed Dach but hardly knocked the 6-foot-4, 197-pounder off the developmental fast track. “I’m grateful for the opportunity, but I always expected to be able to contribute right away,’’ Dach said. As confident as Dach was, the Hawks needed more time to devise their best strategy. They had nine games to decide whether to keep Dach on the roster all season or reassign him to the Saskatoon Blades in the WHL and preserve a year of service. Before Dach’s sixth game against the Predators in Nashville, Hawks general manager Stan Bowman and coach Jeremy Colliton invited the teenager to lunch at the team hotel to break the good news. “We had a great conversation and they just told me they believed in me,’’ Dach said. It’s easy to see why. Dach slid seamlessly onto the fourth line between unselfish veterans Ryan Carpenter and Zach Smith, who played in his first NHL game when Dach was 7. Dach skillfully handles the puck, showing savvy and stickhandling ability that complement his rangy size. An innate hockey sense helps Dach anticipate situations like a veteran and a willingness to get physical makes you wonder how dangerous he can become once he adds 15 or 20 pounds of muscle. Around the NHL, analysts have compared Dach to eight-time All-Star Ryan Getzlaf, but he prefers to pattern his game after Predators center Ryan Johansen, who also debuted as a teenager. Around Chicago, the city’s youngest budding sports star is 11 months younger than Bulls rookie Coby White and three years younger than 22-year-olds Roquan Smith of the Bears, Eloy Jimenez of the White Sox and Nico Hoerner of the Cubs. Does Dach have the brightest future of the bunch? What a good debate. “He’s a tremendous talent,’’ Colliton told reporters. “We’ve got a lot of fun times ahead of us watching him develop, and he’s going to be a big-time player for us. He’s helping us win.’’ Indeed, Dach’s ascent has coincided with the Hawks’ resurgence. A 4-7-3 start cried for change and Colliton responded — suggesting Dach wasn’t the only guy in the Hawks dressing room showing signs of growth. Colliton shook up the lines at the beginning of this month — reuniting Patrick Kane with Andrew DeBrincat and Dylan Strome on the second line that carried the Hawks at times in Colliton’s first season. Perhaps a more impactful move, however, involved Colliton tweaking his system to generate more pace and scoring. Instead of dumping and chasing to reduce neutral-zone turnovers, the Hawks returned to the style that worked well last season when Colliton allowed forwards to carry the puck into the offensive zone and transition out of their end. That philosophical shift in-season opened up more avenues for creativity and broke Kane out of his scoring slump — he entered Tuesday on a six-game goal streak. Freer to make plays, the Hawks offense finally produced enough to ease the burden on a struggling defense and stand-on-your-head goalies Robin Lehner and Corey Crawford. “All of a sudden, it seems like we have more options coming out of our end, we have more motion, more speed, which is always a good thing,’’ Kane told Blackhawks.com. All of a sudden, Kane and Co. look capable of returning to the postseason just as Bowman promised in training camp. The addition of Dach makes the Hawks a more serious playoff contender in every way. Chicago Tribune Blackhawks hope they’re not the same team that allowed an NHL-record 33 shots in one period to the Lightning last season Jimmy Greenfield Nov. 20, 2019 The shots began to pile up early and by the time the 20 minutes were over, the number on the scoreboard defied belief. Thirty-three shots. In a single period. Jonathan Toews doesn’t remember every game from his career. On Wednesday he couldn’t recall the 2009 game when Brent Seabrook scored in the 11th round of a shootout that’s being commemorated on Thursday with a Seabrook bobblehead. But he clearly recalls last season’s debacle at the United Center on Oct. 21, 2018, when the Lightning set a modern-day NHL record with those 33 shots in a crazy second period, scoring three goals. “That was kind of the bottom for us, I think, where things were really hitting the fan,” Toews said. “If you know what I mean.” The Blackhawks face the Lightning at the United Center for the first time since that game which — not to pick on Toews’ memory — wasn’t actually at a point when things were going badly. The Hawks entered the game 4-1-2 after beating the Blue Jackets the night before behind Corey Crawford’s 37 saves. That left Cam Ward to play the second game of the back-to-back against the Lightning. By the time the 6-3 loss was over, Ward had faced 55 shots. “I don’t even know what to say, to be honest,” an exhausted Ward said afterward. The Hawks managed to win their next two games but then embarked on a losing streak that led to the firing of coach Joel Quenneville on Nov. 6. The Lightning went on to compile 128 points in the regular season, the fourth-most in NHL history. “They can make plays and they were just burning us in every way imaginable,” Toews said. “I’d like to think we’ve made a lot of strides as a team this year and we’re a different team.” The Hawks are a very different team. But have they made strides? That's not nearly as clear. Remember defensemen Brandon Davidson and Jan Rutta, and forwards Alexandre Fortin and Andreas Martinsen? They were in the Hawks lineup last season against the Lightning, as were the now-retired Chris Kunitz and Ward, as well as Marcus Kruger, who is now playing overseas. Only nine Hawks who played in last season’s game are expected to be in the lineup against the Lightning on Thursday. And yet this revamped Hawks team is allowing shots at a much higher rate than last season’s team. The Hawks ended last season having allowed 34.8 shots per game, second-worst in the league. Over the first 21 games this season, the Hawks have allowed a league-worst 36.9 shots per game. They’ve outshot their opponents four times in 21 games. “We don’t want to be outshot, but it’s not the only thing that we’re concerned with,” Hawks coach Jeremy Colliton said after Wednesday’s practice at Fifth Third Arena. "We’re probably more concerned with scoring chances and I think our team (has) the ability to convert at a pretty high rate. That’s what we did last year in the second half and that’s what we didn’t do at the beginning of this year. “We weren’t creating that much less — I think basically an average of one chance a game less that we were creating — we just weren’t scoring. Now we’ve kind of fixed that, so if we can limit the quality that we’re giving up and get that goaltending, I think that’s a formula we can win with.” The Hawks are giving up nearly the same number of scoring chances and high-danger chances as they did last season. According to naturalstattrick.com, the Hawks allowed 30.17 scoring chances per 60 minutes last season and 13.66 high- danger scoring chances, both last in the league. This season they're second-worst in both categories with rates of 29.76 and 12.8. “Everyone tracks (scoring chances) different, but for us it’s probably where the shot comes from, obviously where on the ice ..