Sorry, moms: Blackhawks left with mixed feelings after Wild erases 3-goal deficit

Posted January 28, 2026 6:20 pm

By Mark Lazerus

ST. PAUL, Minn. — It would almost be easier if they had just fallen apart — collapsed, choked, gagged, whatever your favorite synonym might be. Had they taken foolish penalties, had they handled the puck like a greased pig, had they panicked in their own end and comically crashed into each other, had they melted down and given the game away.

At least then the Chicago Blackhawks would know how to feel. Lord knows they’ve done it enough over the past seven or eight years.

But that’s not what happened Tuesday night in St. Paul. Yes, the Blackhawks led 3-0 and lost 4-3. In front of their mothers, no less. Those are the facts of the case. But what happened in between wasn’t so much a Blackhawks collapse as it was a Minnesota Wild clawback. And come on, shootouts aren’t real hockey anyway, right?

“It was a 3-0 lead, so it’s a little bit unfortunate,” coach Jeff Blashill said. “(But) when you take the emotion out of it — which is, obviously, we’re frustrated — the (scoring) chances we had were 23-14 us. You’re going to win that game 98% of the time. We just didn’t win it tonight. I thought that’s the best we’ve played in a while, to be honest with you.”

So the Blackhawks didn’t really know how to feel after this one. Blashill’s not wrong: The Blackhawks played one of their best games of the season against a Wild team that has legitimate Stanley Cup aspirations. The new-look top line of Frank Nazar, Connor Bedard and Teuvo Teräväinen was dominant, out-chancing the Wild 9-3 at five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick. The Blackhawks held Kirill Kaprizov in check all game, holding him to one shot (and just three attempts) and keeping him off the scoresheet until he scored the lone goal of the shootout. They dominated at the faceoff dot and played stout team defense and simple team offense.

But they lost all the same.

Yakov Trenin sniped one past Spencer Knight off the rush to give Minnesota life at 12:33 of the second. Quinn Hughes did what Quinn Hughes does and created a rebound chance that Joel Eriksson Ek buried early in the third. And with Wallstedt coming off for the extra attacker, Jared Spurgeon tucked in an Eriksson Ek rebound with 2:02 left in regulation to tie it.

None of those was a ghastly, unforgivable miscue by the Blackhawks. The Wild is just good. And it fought back. Sometimes that’s just how it happens. Hockey’s not always a zero-sum game.

A win would have made it five straight on the road dating to just after Christmas. Since then, the Blackhawks have won at Dallas, at Washington, at Nashville, at Carolina and came agonizingly close at Minnesota.

There’s a lot to like. And the Blackhawks insist they’re a mature enough team to understand that and keep a frustrating result in its proper perspective.

“It’s definitely hard not to get emotional about it and say we lost, but I think we did a lot of good things,” Ryan Donato said.

But the moms. There’s nothing worse than disappointing your mom. An unkind schedule without many two-game trips didn’t leave a lot of options open for the annual parents trip. Rather than getting, say, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, or Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, the poor moms got Minnesota and Pittsburgh in late January — with a late-night flight in between. The wind chill was 15 below Tuesday. Ah, but hockey moms are a hardy bunch, and they gave the Blackhawks plenty of life and love during the game.

But it does make the loss hurt a bit more. Donato, for one, said he was thinking about it during the game.

“There’s so much that we as a group have to be thankful for to have our moms here,” he said. “They’ve sacrificed so much for us. Obviously, you’re not thinking, ‘I’ve gotta get this win because of the moms.’ But (you are) at the same time. You want the moms to be having fun and feel like the mojo’s high. It’s unfortunate. We want to get it closed (out) for the moms, too.”

They’ll get another chance Thursday night in Pittsburgh. And the way they see it, if they play the way they did Tuesday, the moms will go home happy.

“You’ve got to go back and repeat,” Blashill said. “We’ve got to do it again in Pittsburgh. We can’t feel sorry for ourselves because we ended up giving up a great lead and lost the shootout. We’ve got to learn from it and be ready to play similarly on Thursday.”

All it would have taken was one power-play goal. But those have been awfully hard to come by for the Blackhawks lately. An 0-for-5 showing Tuesday — including one to close out overtime — makes it 22 consecutive power plays without a goal for Chicago, a stretch that spans eight games.

Why? How?

“It’s a great question,” Nazar said. “If I knew that one, we’d be 5-for-5.”

Ask any of the 18,000 or so livid Wild fans in the building, and they’ll tell you the officials were trying to hand the game to the Blackhawks — and they certainly did get away with a few down the stretch — but the way the power play is going these days, it hardly mattered. Two revamped units, with Bedard and Nazar separated, didn’t result in any production, though Blashill was marginally happier with the showing.

“I thought it was better, I will say that,” he said. “I thought we had more chances. We’ve walked away from other days where I just didn’t feel it was dangerous at all, and I thought we had a good number of chances. I think we had five. But when you have a four-on-three in overtime, a full two minutes, you’ve got to find a way to score. Those are the differences in winning and losing games.”

The new top line was terrific, with Bedard getting eight shots on goal, Nazar having two golden chances and Teräväinen smacking in a rebound of a Louis Crevier slap-pass to Bedard for the game’s first goal.

But Nazar now has just one goal since Oct. 28, a stretch of 27 games (he missed about a month with a broken jaw). He used his speed to catch up to a slick Bedard saucer pass late in the third but was denied by Jesper Wallstedt. And in the shootout, he had a beauty of a move that beat Wallstedt between the legs but slid just wide.

That’s just how it’s been going for Nazar. Like this particular game in general, the production isn’t matching the play.

“That can be life sometimes,” Nazar said. “Gotta get up and punch it in the balls back.”

Remarkably, this was Chicago’s third shootout in its last four games, and its sixth since Christmas. The Blackhawks are now 3-5 in shootouts. Three-on-three overtime has gotten far less effective as teams get more and more conservative, knowing that every change of possession can be the end of the game.

Is overtime just different now from how it was in the fun-and-gun early years?

“That’s an interesting question,” Blashill said. “I see that (written) a lot. At the end of the day in overtime, the reality is, usually you’ve got to give a little chance to get a big chance. You’re not going to coach that way. Is it different? I don’t know. Some of our overtimes, it’s felt like it’s gone back and forth, but it’s almost like you need a mistake to happen for it to go back and forth. We made a mistake, they didn’t capitalize, we couldn’t kind of transition back. Otherwise, it gets that going back and forth. Are guys better at defending? Maybe, maybe.”