I took a long look at the Hawks earlier this summer, during some playoff downtime. I don’t really have a whole more to say than that about what was wrong with last year’s version of the Hawks – basically, their save percentage was terrible, they appeared to have no discipline and their PP was terrible. I should note – as Chris Boersma did in the comments to that post – that at least some of the bad goaltending was attributable to lousy team defence as a whole but I still have Khabibulin as one of the worst goaltenders in the league. If they addressed those three areas over the course of the summer, they possibly become a fringy playoff team, particularly with the fact that their division is still bad.

Team SIT S/60 RK G/60 RK S% RK SA/60 RK GA/60 RK GD/60 RK SV% RK
CHI ES 32.8 4 2.59 15 7.90% 25 29.9 13 2.98 28 -0.38 27 0.9 28
CHI PP 42.7 29 4.78 30 11.20% 29 8.1 11 0.94 24 3.84 30 0.885 28
CHI PK 8.9 13 0.43 23 4.80% 25 41.8 2 6.24 12 -5.81 13 0.851 21

Changes

Something that the Blackhawks do very well is the provision of a Player Tracker on their website. Other NHL teams should follow their lead here – it’s very useful.

Martin Havlat: The big move that Chicago made this summer, the Black Hawks immediately gave him a 3 year $18MM contract. Havlat has historically been an elite PP player for the Blackhawks and should help them with one of their big problems from the 2005-06 season. There’s a risk in trading for a player like Havlat, in that no one knows what he’ll do outside of the Ottawa PP which was loaded with other top offensive players but he certainly can’t hurt.

Bryan Smolinski: Old guy who should be able to eat minutes without hurting the team. Not going to help the PP.

Michal Handzus: Nothing special on the PP, but he doesn’t look to be a guy who takes a lot of penalties. He had a bad year at ES last season but then Philadelphia wasn’t exactly a team with great goaltending. He’s been solid in the past.

Kyle Calder: Although terrible on the PP last year and generally bad throughout his career, Calder was a scorer at ES for the Hawks last season. He was actually a plus player last year, one of the few Hawks who played significant minutes who can make that claim. He was just a few goals below even at ES in 03-04 on another bad Hawks team. Last season was a noticeable high water mark for him in terms of ES offence; I’d say that the Hawks probably sold high.

Mark Bell: Bell got bombed at ES last season but was perhaps the only Hawk of any use on the PP. It was his second consecutive decent season on the PP (3.64 PPP/60 in 03-04, 4.02 PPP/60 last season). He was EV+ 37 EV- 45 last year, although he looks to have had an off year offensively – he had his lowest ES scoring rate than his rookie year. I’m thinking that Chicago probably sold low here, particularly if he was the guy playing against the opposition’s best players last season.

Goaltending

As mentioned above, this was a real problem for the Blackhawks in 2005-06. It’s probably going to be another year of below average to bad goaltending for the Blackhawks. Their goaltending looks like it’s going to be Patrick Lalime and Nikolai Khabibulin, neither of whom has been anything more than an average goalie at best in the past 4 or 5 years. Both of these players are coming off of terrible seasons and are on the wrong side of 30. Contrary to popular belief, goalies don’t get better after the age of 30 – in fact, many who were above average at best suffer steep declines and disappear from the game quite quickly.

While Khabibulin should hopefully be better than his .899/.845/.898 line of last season, I can’t see them getting much help from Patrick Lalime at all. Khabibulin’s contract is a real millstone for the Blackhawks – they’d be well advised to look for a Doug MacLean type guy to dump this contract on. Unfortunately for Chicago, I just can’t figure out who’d be willing to take on such a contract, particularly given the fact that better goalies than Khabibulin were taking significantly less money last summer.

Chicago’s goaltending will be better, I think (regression works both ways) but I still see them as likely being below average overall. It’s going to be very difficult for the Black Hawks over the next few years as Khabibulin is eating up a huge amount of money ($6.75MM) while he’s going to provide a negligible return. As distasteful as it may be, Chicago probably should have considered taking the hit and buying him out over the summer. As a bit of an aside here, the CBA provision barring teams from including money in trades baffles me. You would think that that would be something that everyone would want. Surely Chicago would be better off if they could move Khabibulin and $9MM to someone as opposed to just paying him to go away.

Even Strength

As you can see from the chart at the beginning, Chicago was actually a surprisingly decent ES team in 2005-06. When you consider that they had Oilersesque goaltending, the fact that they were only a tenth of a goal worse than the Oilers at ES suggests that they were doing a decent job outside of their goaltending. Chicago put up decent numbers in the faceoff analysis I did a little while ago as well – they came in at a 0.98 ratio of offensive/defensive zone faceoffs. We know that Chicago spent a ridiculous amount of time on the PK last year as opposed to the PP as well, which would have slanted their ratio below one. There’s reason to believe that Chicago had a good ES team held back by bad goaltending in 2005-06. The players who they’ve added this season have been good ES players in the past, particularly Handzus and Smolinski. It looks like Chicago kind of moved sideways to me – I’d expect them to be good at ES again this year. The question is whether they’ll get the goaltending to help them out.

Power Play

PLAYER PPTOI PPP/60 PP+/60 PP-/60
BELL MARK 313.33 4.02 5.94 0.57
VOROBIEV PAVEL 131.98 3.64 4.55 1.36
SEABROOK BRENT 264.67 3.63 4.76 0.68
CALDER KYLE 270.53 2.88 5.10 0.89
BOURQUE RENE 201.57 2.68 5.36 0.30
AUCOIN ADRIAN 133.40 2.25 5.85 1.80
LAPOINTE MARTIN 314.08 1.91 4.97 1.34
KEITH DUNCAN 107.75 1.11 6.13 1.11
VANDERMEER JIM 154.95 0.77 1.94 1.16

The power play in Chicago was terrible last season and I don’t see a whole lot of hope for it this season. As mentioned above, Mark Bell was the only non-terrible Hawk on the PP last year – other than him, it’s ugly. I’m mystified by the fact that Jim Vandermeer played 155 minutes on the PP last season – he makes Eric Brewer look like Bobby Orr. Adrian Aucoin missed a big chunk of last season but he’s nothing special on the PP – his best rate was 3.30 PPP/60 and his career rate looks to be around 3.00.

The good news for the Hawks is that Martin Havlat has historically been an elite PP producer. The bad news is that he leaves one of the best PP environments in the league in Ottawa and comes to one of the undeniably worst. For those who are interested in questions like the extent to which the player creates or created by a high scoring environment, Havlat should be added to Alex Tanguay on the list of players to pay attention to next season. I’d figure the Hawks PP to be better – regression would almost demand it – but still not very good.

Penalty Kill

Chicago had a surprisingly good penalty kill last year that was undone by some shoddy goaltending. The problem for the Black Hawks was the sheer volume of penalties that they took. The only team in the league to spend more time shorthanded was Nashville. The Hawks can probably expect to be done in again by shoddy goaltending but they’d do well to keep their shots against on the PP to a similarly low level. If Chicago is going to move forward next season, they’re probably going to need to cut the penalties significantly, if only because they’re not going to get good goaltending on the PP.

Outlook

Chicago’s got some decent upside I think, with the caveat that they’re probably going to be held back by the goaltending. They’ve got a young team, so if they’re going to surprise in either direction, it’s probably going to be in a good way, as only Smolinski, Martin Lapointe, Aucoin and Jassen Cullimore start the season older than 30. If they get the goaltending, the PP and the discipline, they’ve got a shot; discipline is the only area I can realistically see them making significant gains in. I see them in the 10-15 area in the conference along with the other two bad Central Division teams.

Even looking further ahead, you can’t help but think that this team is going to be screwed because of that Khabibulin contract for some time to come. The Lapointe contract is no prize big either. Even if Khabibulin somehow gives them average goaltending, he’s nowhere near worth his paycheque and with Chicago hovering just below $40MM already, it’s hard to see them adding much more to their payroll. Lapointe provided them with an astounding 300+ minutes of sub 2.00 PPP/60 ice time – not only is it appallingly bad but it’s incredibly expensive at $2.4MM (and signed for next year) per. There’s some decent potential in Chicago but the expensive deadweight is going to hamstring them for some time to come.