Hawks can't get anything going, fall 2-0 to Avs

You could tell Joel Quenneville was a little perturbed Tuesday morning, and a reporter's question about this being the time of year a coach worries about a lack of energy from his team seemed to hit a nerve.

"You must have been watching our morning skate," Quenneville said. "I felt like that was what the mindset could be. We've got to guard against that."

And then the Blackhawks went out and allowed goals from Nathan MacKinnon and Maxime Talbot in the opening 1:17 of the game and despite their furious attempt to rally, couldn't get one of their season-high 54 shots past Hawk-killer Semyon Varlamov and fell 2-0 to Colorado on Tuesday night at the United Center.

That didn't improve Quenneville's mood one bit.

"We talked about it the last couple of days, giving up the first goal, getting off to poor starts," he said. "Today, you couldn't even call it a poor start.

"You're down, you don't even know you're in the game and you're down 2-0."

His players had no explanation.

"It shows you can't take any night off or any game lightly," Duncan Keith said. "You've got to start good and play 60 minutes. Unfortunately we got behind early and couldn't get it back."

It marked the sixth straight game in which the Hawks have fallen behind early, and it's starting to wear on them.

"We'll try and do ourselves a favor in the next one and get ahead and make the other team chance us for ince instead of playing catch-up like we have in the past few games," Hawks captain Jonathan Toews said.

The Hawks knew they'd be in for a rough one Tuesday with Varlamov between the pipes. After all, he's the same guy who turned away 168 of the 175 shots the Hawks have hit him with the past two seasons.

"One thing with him, if you think you have an open net or you think he's out of position, he's really not," Patrick Kane said.

It looked like the Hawks finally had broken the Varlamov hex late in the third when Brandon Saad pushed a rebound past him only to be informed that the play already had been whistled dead.

"We had as many chances as we needed to come back and make a game of it," Toews said.

"Obviously, Varly was the star of the game," Avs coach Patrick Roy said. "He was outstanding out there, made some really good saves.

"I mean, the quality of their team, they put a lot of shots on net, especially from outside … they shoot from everywhere."

The loss dropped the Hawks 2 points behind Nashville in the Central Division.

"You want to get those points against teams in our division for sure," Keith said. "It's a tight race and it's going to be tight all the way through."

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