Hawks just too slow to adjust

In the children's tale, the tortoise eventually caught the hare.

No such luck for the unlikely tortoise - aka the Blackhawks - at the United Center on Saturday night against a very hare-y Vancouver squad that skated circles around the home team for at least the final 40 minutes en route to a 5-1 thumping in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals.

"We were slow out there right from the start," Hawks defenseman Duncan Keith said. "We were slow to loose pucks. Slow everywhere.

"We were just all slow."

That's something that's rarely uttered about the young Hawks, a team considered one of the speediest in the league.

How could that possibly happen?

"I don't know," Keith said. "We have a fast team. We have speed, but for whatever reason we weren't moving out there."

Veteran John Madden, who has seen it all when it comes to playoff battles, had an answer.

"It slows you down real quick when they bury 3 goals right away," Madden said. "We started to take some chances and then all of a sudden you're in a track meet."

It was one they weren't going to win and one that commenced after a pair of Vancouver goals off defensive turnovers by the Hawks late in the first period were followed by a Globetrotters-like tally in which twins Henrik and Daniel Sedin toyed with goalie Antti Niemi on a goal just 30 seconds into the second.

"We had the puck tonight and then we gave it away, sometimes without pressure," Hawks coach Joel Quenneville said. "We didn't manage it very well in all zones. I thought all three first goals against us were all plays that, technically or mentally, we played very poorly."

And after a first period in which the Hawks outshot Vancouver 17-13, their offensive game went south along with their defense.

"We didn't make their defenders defend very much," Quenneville said. "We wanted to come at them in waves and that didn't really materialize."

Now the question is, How do the Hawks bounce back from Saturday's debacle? The answer, according to Keith, is to utilize the one weapon missing from Game 1.

"Just use our speed," he said. "We're a confident team. We know we're good enough."

And they also know that home-ice advantage hasn't been that important in the Stanley Cup playoffs thus far - isn't that right, John Madden?

"That's what we're going with now."