Nothing is going right for the Blackhawks. They certainly haven’t helped themselves much during a frustrating start to the season, but they haven’t been lucky, either.
Case in point: Ryan Donato. He had five prime scoring chances Sunday against the Panthers and didn’t convert any. Among them, he couldn’t push a sliding puck into an open net in the first period, and his stick broke after he was set up perfectly in the third.
The Hawks also couldn’t capitalize on Frank Nazar’s partial breakaway or Cole Smith’s breakaway from the red line, both in the third period. And they allowed the winning goal with 2:23 left after a bad change, falling to the Panthers 3-2.
The player responsible for the screw-up was defenseman Kevin Korchinski, who otherwise played well in his first game back after being scratched for seven in a row.
After getting a boost from Connor Bedard’s return and winning his first two games back, the Hawks have lost three in a row and have fallen to 3-8. Their schedule has been a gauntlet, and they’ve had their top forward (Bedard) and top defenseman (Bowen Byram) in the lineup for one game. But the promise of last season and the return of Patrick Kane haven’t yielded positive results.
‘‘There’s going to be frustration; we’re 3-8,’’ Bedard said. ‘‘You’ve got to use that in the next game and try to dig ourselves out. When you play with that edge, you play a little better. If we can do that the rest of the year, that’d be great.’’
Scoring would help. The Hawks have three goals during their skid. And for all the excitement surrounding Kane, he has one goal and a team-worst minus-13 plus/minus. He’s on the Hawks’ five-forward power-play unit, an experiment that hasn’t exactly worked. Overall, the power play went 0-for-7 against the Panthers.
‘‘The power play is mirroring our five-on-five game: We can’t score,’’ coach Jeff Blashill said. ‘‘I can’t say that we don’t get any chances; I think we do. Power plays are funny animals. You can get [lousy] power plays and score and good power plays not.
‘‘We’re just not scoring easy at all, and we have really good players that are going to score goals that are not scoring.’’
Shooting would help. The Hawks put 21 shots on net, right at their average. And when they did that, good things tended to happen. Ryan Greene opened the scoring with his first goal of the season. Korchinski shot the puck wide, but it went off the boards to Andrew Mangiapane, who passed to Greene in front of the net.
The Hawks veritably peppered Panthers goalie Akira Schmid with a whopping nine shots in the second period. One went in when Roman Kantserov took a pass from Kane in the right circle and beat Schmid to tie the score at 2.
The game appeared headed to overtime until the Hawks’ change went bad. Aaron Ekblad sent a pass from the Panthers’ own end to Lars Eller at the Hawks’ blue line. Eller skated in and beat Spencer Knight to his blocker side.
‘‘He’s going to want the change back,’’ Blashill said of Korchinski. ‘‘But I thought he played solid in that pair with [Sam Rinzel]. Both of them did a lot of good things. It’s unfortunate that he had the tough change.
‘‘I thought we did a lot of good things through the majority of the game. I thought the last half of the first [period] was the only time I didn’t like us at all. That was the only time I thought we got pushed around. But we came back out in the second. I thought [we] had great pushback in terms of competing. I thought we had great, great compete.’’
That hasn’t been enough, however.
