Smith knows you've got to earn ice time

Ben Smith knows the beauty and the dark side of playing on a team with as much depth as the Blackhawks currently have.

The beauty is the consistent winning, like, oh, a couple of Stanley Cups in the last handful of years.

The dark side is the fierce competition for ice time, meaning quality players like himself and Marcus Kruger appear destined to make up two-thirds of what should be one of the strongest fourth lines in the league — at least for the time being.

“It's a good thing but it's a frustrating thing too,” Smith said. “You just try to play your role as best you can. I'm happy to help this team however I can, whether it's playing eight minutes or 20 minutes. It's one of those things on this team that can kind of depend on night to night.”

But the ultimate beauty, according to Smith, of playing for a Joel Quenneville-coached team remains a constant:

“Whatever line you're on here, you're going to get some ice time.”

Shoot. The. Puck:

Despite owning the first two periods against Montreal in terms of shots on goals (22-9), Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville envisioned an even wider margin.

“I thought we were looking for too many stick-to-stick passes and too many perfect plays,” Quenneville said. “Particularly on the power play we didn't shoot the puck. We could've got some more momentum off of it. We were in pretty good control of the game and they scored and they got some momentum off of it.

“We were fine the way we were playing, but we can generate more by shooting more and more traffic and looking for confusion, or ugly plays or ugly goals and in this league, you've got know that shots create and traffic creates. When you're on the outside and looking for a better play, generally you're going to be defending at the end of it.”

No time to panic:

Despite going 0-for-4 on the power play against Montreal, Joel Quenneville saw some things he liked from his top two units.

“It was the first day we really had a little bit more continuity with it,” he said. “We did some good things, besides not shooting it. We practiced it this week, so it's a start and I think there's some positive things.

“Hopefully we can get better off it and get some production to reflect it, but it's early in the preseason and we just practiced it for the first time going into (Wednesday's) game, so we'll look to try to get a little confidence going into the regular season.”

Numbers game:

For a brief time Thursday morning, the Hawks roster stood at 27 after forward Ryan Hartman was assigned to Rockford.

It jumped back to 28 a few hours later, however, when defenseman Klas Dahlbeck was recalled from the IceHogs.

Does this mean there might be a bigger move afoot imminently?

Stay tuned.