Blackhawks' 3-game winning streak ends
Presented with a golden opportunity to enjoy the Christmas break riding a four-game winning streak, the Blackhawks were instead run over Sunday by a hungrier, faster, more opportunistic Florida Panthers squad at the United Center.
The Panthers took advantage of the Hawks' sloppy play and snapped a 2-2 tie with a pair of goals just 31 seconds apart in the second period en route to a 6-3 victory.
The Hawks, who fell to 13-20-6, just completed a stretch of nine games in 15 days and admitted fatigue may have set in.
"I don't know whether it's just playing a lot of games in a few nights (with) travel, (but) guys seemed to lose a bit of their jump that we had before," said defenseman Connor Murphy, who opened the scoring at 13:23 of the first period.
The Hawks had gone 4-1-1 in their last six games, with three of those wins coming consecutively over Nashville, Dallas and Colorado. With Florida (15-14-6) having played at Detroit on Saturday, everything seemed to be lining up for the Hawks.
But it was not to be.
After Alex DeBrincat made it 2-2 with his 17th goal of the season at 4:56 of the second period, Florida's Mike Hoffman scored on the power play at 16:49 to give the Panthers a 3-2 lead.
On the very next shift, MacKenzie Weegar received no resistance skating into the offensive zone and fired a shot between Brent Seabrook and Carl Dahlstrom. The shot hit Cam Ward's right pad, but bounced left and directly to a streaking Jared McCann, who easily buried his sixth goal of the season.
McCann skated right by Dahlstrom to make the play.
"You talk about it in hockey - when you get scored on, the next shift by everyone in the lineup has got to be important and big," Murphy said. "You've got to push back on your toes instead of playing safe or trying not to get scored on. They jumped on their chances and scored on a couple of those.
"Definitely, we didn't get going quick enough."
It was a rough outing for Ward, who had allowed just 3 goals in his previous two starts. The Hawks' netminder made just 21 saves and fell to 6-6-4 on the season.
Dylan Strome scored the Hawks' other goal, making it 5-3 at 9:35 of the third. Strome now has 9 goals on the season and 6 in 15 games with the Hawks.
The challenge now will be to forget this game and build off the six previous games when this team was beginning to play the way coach Jeremy Colliton expects.
The Hawks host Minnesota on Thursday, go to Colorado on Saturday and then play Boston at South Bend in the Winter Classic on Jan. 1.
"It's pretty obvious when we're playing a certain way, we're a good team," Strome said. "We've shown that - other than (against) San Jose - for two-and-a-half or three weeks. … We've just got to play the right way and follow the game plan. ...
"Hopefully we can continue that after Christmas and continue the little good run that we're on."