Young IceHogs remain a work in progress

To check out the team’s top prospects in person during baseball season, White Sox fans have to head south to either Charlotte or Birmingham.

It’s no picnic for Cubs fans either, the options being Iowa or Tennessee.

But to catch the Blackhawks’ players of the future, all that’s required is a little jaunt west down I-90 to the BMO Harris Bank Center in Rockford, home of the IceHogs, the Hawks’ American Hockey League affiliate.

And with the parent club in the midst of an extended road trip and the Hogs home for three games this holiday week, now may be as good a time as any.

If you go, though, be prepared, because what you’ll find is a work in progress.

With a new head coach and a boatload of young players, the Hogs have struggled out of the gate to a 6-9-1-0 mark. Despite that, first-year coach Ted Dent likes the potential he sees, and he thinks fans will as well.

“We’re playing hockey whistle to whistle; hard, clean checking and going to the net hard,” Dent said. “There’s not a lot of extra curricular things going on. We just want to play good, hard hockey and play an aggressive style in the offensive zone.”

Just like the parent club, until recently, that is.

“I like the group we have. We’re young, but we’re eager to learn,” Dent said. “Our job is to get better every day as a group and individually as well, and I think we’re doing that.

“We’ve come up short a few times as far as the wins are concerned — but we’ll keep going and keep trying to get better.”

One of those youngsters still trying to find his way is 6-foot-5, 220-pound winger Jimmy Hayes.

The former Boston College star, who played a handful of games with the Hogs at the end of last season, admits that life in the AHL — from the travel to the number of games — is quite different from his college days.

“It’s going well, but I’m still getting adjusted to the transition,” said Hayes, who has 3 goals and 5 assists in 14 games. “It’s a different game for me from college, so I’m trying to keep working on all aspects of my game to get to where I want to be.”

“It’s a little different from the college schedule, obviously,” Dent said. “We play 76 games and we have a lot of midweek games, and college hockey is primarily Fridays and Saturdays and you only play 35 to 45 games. That’s going to be a change, for sure.

“We’re trying to get Jimmy to play to his strengths, use his size and his reach. Things we’re focused on with him is his puck protection, shielding the puck, controlling the corners and being hard to play against in front of the opposition’s net — staying there, fighting for space and hacking and whacking for rebounds.”

How is it going?

“It’s a work in progress, for sure. I’m not going to say that it’s there yet,” Dent said. “All first-year guys are trying to find their way, trying to know the opposition, trying to understand what the coach expects of them, and Jimmy’s no different than anyone else.”

While Hayes continues to strive for a complete game, the Hogs as a team are doing the same.

They’re slowly getting there.

“We just have to get goaltending, defense and the forwards all playing well on the same night,” Dent said. “We usually have two of the three, but now we have to get the three groups going on the same night and then I’m sure we’ll have some success here as we go.”

And they absolutely, positively have to stay out of the penalty box, a fact Dent and his assistants constantly preach.

“Our penalty-killing numbers aren’t great and our goals-against aren’t good,” he said. “We don’t want to give the opposition any chance to inflate that. Discipline is big at this level unless your penalty-killing and your goaltenders are elite. We haven’t had that over our last five or six games.”

But remember it’s all still a work in progress.

“We’re a young team, but we have unbelievable leadership,” said Hayes, who turned 22 on Monday. “We’re headed in the right direction.”