After poor showing against Predators, we’re about to learn something about these Blackhawks

Posted November 29, 2025 6:01 pm

By Mark Lazerus and Scott Powers

So what happens now?

Now that the Chicago Blackhawks can’t just chalk it up to facing the league’s juggernaut, now that they can’t find solace in an excellent first two periods? Now that the losing streak — technically a “winless” streak thanks to the overtime point against the Wild, but the players know better — has reached five games? Now that they’ve dropped the only “easy” game, a 4-3 loss to the Nashville Predators on Friday, in one of the toughest stretches of the schedule, with a game against the high-flying, first-place Anaheim Ducks on Sunday, followed by a daunting four-game Western road trip? Now that they’ve all but squandered a three-week stretch with just one road game?

How will these Blackhawks, without their injured captain and without much experience in games that matter, handle their first real adversity since an impressive first quarter of the season raised expectations around these parts?

Jeff Blashill seems as eager to find out as the rest of us.

“Confidence is a funny thing,” the Blackhawks coach said. “It’s a huge thing in this game, in sports in general, and, I guess, in life. My only answer is, you have to earn your own confidence and you earn it by doing things right. You earn it by your compete and your work ethic. You have to dig in. And I think only the most mentally tough survive this league. So we’re going to have to be mentally tough and dig in.”

This is hardly the time to panic. Everything that was said Wednesday after the Minnesota loss still stands, and while their confidence does sound a bit shaken, these Blackhawks don’t seem in danger of spiraling back into the abyss in which the franchise has languished for the last several years. Even during this skid, the only true clunker in the bunch was a 9-3 loss in Buffalo, the kind of inexplicably awful game every team has from time to time. The Blackhawks did play well against Seattle. They did hang tough with the seemingly unstoppable Avalanche.

They did play two outstanding periods and came away with a point against the red-hot Wild. They even did a few good things against Nashville, a team that won in regulation for just the second time in nearly a month. Heck, in a 30-second span in the second period, André Burakovsky shot just wide on a breakaway, Ryan Greene hit the post and Connor Bedard was absolutely robbed by Juuse Saros. Had just one of those pucks been an inch or two to the right, maybe the Blackhawks win this one and we’re having a completely different discussion.

But they didn’t. So we’re not.

The Blackhawks were sluggish against Nashville, looking more like normies who ate too much on Thanksgiving than finely tuned professional athletes. They were sloppy with the puck, careless in their own end, and once again awful in the second period, during which the Predators scored three times. In the first and third periods this season, Chicago is outscoring its opponents 55-36. In the second period, opponents are outscoring Chicago 29-19.

“If we had an answer, we would’ve corrected it,” Burakovsky said. “It’s got to be a mentality thing. I don’t know. We talk about it, we come out, it happens again. We talk about it, we come out, it happens again. We’ve got to figure it out, and we’ve got to figure it out now.”

The urgency is suddenly real. After a quick turnaround to host Anaheim on Sunday afternoon, the Blackhawks head to Las Vegas to face the Golden Knights, then play two straight against the Kings and a rematch in Anaheim. That’s five straight against teams currently in playoff spots. A win over Nashville could have reset things heading into that gauntlet. Instead, a loss triggered some alarms.

“We’d better learn,” Blashill said. “It’s an everyday league, man. We had a number of guys not have their ‘A’ game tonight. And it happens, I guess. That’s going to happen. You’re not going to bring your ‘A’ game every night. But your next game has to be a ‘B’ game, not a ‘C’ game. We had too many guys probably have their ‘C’ game. You have to find a way when we’re not on top of it, maybe when we’re not great, to still be good. And I didn’t think we were good enough tonight.”

Some of this was inevitable, of course. The Blackhawks’ strong start wasn’t a mirage — as Blashill said, when they bring their best, they can hang with the best. But it was boosted by some tough-to-sustain underlying numbers, too. And as the save and shooting percentages dip back toward the mean, there are fair questions to ask about how viable a playoff contender this team really is.

Are they too dependent on Spencer Knight? Arvid Söderblom was hardly the lone culprit in either game, but he’s now given up 13 goals in his last two starts. He’d surely like back the Luke Evangelista shot that beat him clean through the legs barely a minute after Greene’s power-play equalizer late in the second period.

Are they really as defensively sound as Knight made them appear? Witness Louis Crevier and Matt Grzelcyk losing Ryan O’Reilly and letting him get behind them for a backbreaker goal that made it 4-2 Nashville in the third period. Artyom Levshunov, who has shown so much promise and production lately, had a rough game as well. It’s bound to happen, but when it happens, it’s glaring.

Are they relying too much on offense from Bedard and Tyler Bertuzzi? Both had dangerous looks again against Nashville, but Bedard was held without a point for the fourth time in the last seven games (he had four goals and three assists in the other three games, so it’s foolish to find fault with him). Frank Nazar hasn’t scored a goal since before Halloween. Ilya Mikheyev has one goal since Oct. 15. Ryan Donato’s first-period snipe — with a cotton ball shoved up his left nostril after taking a Brady Skjei stick to the face — was just his second goal in 14 games.

“The last few games, we played great and we didn’t get the win,” Burakovsky said. “Today, we just made it hard for ourselves. Nashville is a team that we should and can beat. We just mentally didn’t want it enough today, I guess.”

That’s fine once in a while. As Blashill said, it happens. But it can’t keep happening. Not against the upcoming schedule. Not if the Blackhawks want to stay in the mix. Not if they want to prove that their strong start was the real thing, and that their current skid is the aberration.

No, this is not a crisis. The season’s too young, the team’s been too good and the stakes are too low in what was supposed to be another rebuilding season for it to be a crisis. But it’s a test of the Blackhawks’ fortitude, resilience and character.

One way or the other, the next week and a half will be telling.

Game observations

1. Burakovsky returned after missing three games with injury and was right back in his usual spot on Bedard’s right wing, despite the success Bertuzzi has had playing with Bedard. He had a secondary assist on Donato’s goal and had another assist taken away on Greene’s power-play goal in the second period. He also had a rather gruesome turnover in his own end late in the second period on which Michael Bunting fortunately shot wide.

Blashill said Burakovsky was one of the few Blackhawks who had “pretty good jump” on Friday, but Burakovsky wasn’t so happy with how he felt on the ice.

“I wouldn’t say great,” Burakovsky said. “Yeah, not great.”

2. Greene has been aggressive lately in trying to snap out of his own scoring funk, and had four shots on goal for the third time in his last five games, after having three total in the previous six. Many of those have been high-danger chances. He finally buried one on Friday, banging home a feed by Oliver Moore from behind the net for a second-period power-play goal that tied the score at 2-2.

“It felt good,” Greene said. “There are still some that I feel like I need to score on. That’s something I’m trying to work on. But yeah, it felt pretty good to see one go in.”

“Greener’s playing really good,” Blashill said. “He’s just a little snakebit. If he finishes on some of those, he’s probably one of the (league’s) top three stars of the week.”

3. Söderblom finished with 25 saves on 29 shots. His .879 save percentage is 56th in the league among goalies with at least five starts, and he has a negative goals-saved-above-expected for the season.

Coming off the fiasco in Buffalo, the Blackhawks wanted to do better by him.

“Obviously, everyone knows what happened in Buffalo,” Nazar said before the game. “So we all want to have a great game, and back him up and show him we’re going to work for him.”

4. As Blashill has analyzed the Blackhawks’ recent losses, he’s pretty confident that the problems are not due to his consistent use of a lineup with 11 forwards and seven defensemen. Even as forwards have returned from injury and he’s had to make some tougher decisions on whom to sit, Blashill remains committed to his lineup.

“I don’t foresee (changing) that in the near future,” he said on Friday. “If I thought we were starting to lose maybe a scoring punch and stuff like that, I would be worried. But over the last couple of games against two teams that haven’t given up much, we’ve created a lot. I know we didn’t score against Colorado, but we created a lot in that game. In the last game against a Minnesota team that’s been really stingy lately, we created a lot. So, for me, it’s continuing to work and it’s the best makeup of our group.”

5. The Blackhawks wore their throwback black jerseys for the first time on Black Friday. Fittingly, Chris Chelios and Éric Dazé — two of the biggest stars from that jersey’s era — sounded the horn at the start of the game. They’ll wear them again Sunday against Anaheim.