Dusted in the desert: Hawks drop ugly game to lowly Coyotes
It's always nice when you're presented with a gimme in the sports world.
The 18-inch birdie putt. The 20-yard field goal. The layup. The meatball off-speed pitch.
A game against the Arizona Coyotes.
Not often do you see them messed up.
Yet, the Blackhawks found a way with the final example, dropping a 6-4 decision to the comically bad Coyotes in Glendale, Arizona on Thursday.
Winners of just six of 31 coming in, the Coyotes snapped a 2-2 tie with 3 unanswered goals, staved off a furious rally and cemented the victory on Johan Larsson's empty netter with 29 seconds remaining.
The Hawks, who got goals from Kirby Dach, MacKenzie Entwistle, Alex DeBrincat and Jonathan Toews, have dropped six straight to fall to 11-18-5.
Larsson, a 29-year-old winger, ended up with a hat trick, his first 3 goals of the season.
It took nearly 25 minutes before someone addressed the media. That someone was Toews, who wouldn't get into specifics of what was said in the postgame locker room.
"There's clearly times in these last few games where we're playing good hockey," Toews said. "Then we decide to take a few shifts off, give up momentum and take some tough penalties that we're not killing off. Then one thing leads to another and we've got to work really hard to build that momentum back up again.
"We've got to find ways to commit to each other and not have those lapses of energy and focus."
Defenseman Connor Murphy echoed his captain's thoughts, saying: "We all care about the end result of the game, but that's only going to take care of itself if you do put in that effort every shift. That is definitely a great point by (Toews)."
So how bad are the Coyotes?
Well, they were 30th on the power play (14.3%), 31st on the penalty kill (71.2%), an abysmal 2-11-1 at home and never held a 2-goal lead until Thursday.
Most incredible? In 22 of 31 games they scored zero, 1 or 2 goals.
Against the Hawks, though, they found a way to beat Marc-Andre Fleury five times.
The Hawks battled back with a nice second period, tying things up on goals by Dach (6) and Entwistle (4). They also didn't allow a shot on goal for more than nine minutes.
But Arizona went ahead 3-2 Travis Boyd's power-play goal midway through the second. The Hawks have now allowed a power-play goal in 14 of the last 20 games.
Clayton Keller gave Arizona a 4-2 lead at 3:10 of the third period on a long shot from the point. The Hawks challenged, saying Fleury was interfered with, but officials disagreed, leading to the Coyotes fifth power play. It took them just 51 seconds to cash in as Larsson scored at 4:01 to make it 5-2.
Toews scored 2.5 minutes later and DeBrincat added a power-play goal at 13:21, but the Hawks couldn't find the equalizer.
"We don't want this little skid to snowball into something bigger than it is," Toews said. "So mentally (we need to) flush a couple of those down the tube and just move onto the next game. If we keep playing as a team, we're a little more consistent with our effort things are gonna start clicking for us."
Slap shot:
The Hawks placed Brandon Hagel, Sam Lafferty and Erik Gustafsson in COVID protocol just before their game against Arizona on Thursday. Laffery was acquired from Pittsburgh for Alex Nylander on Wednesday. ... Nicolas Beaudin played as the seventh defenseman for the Hawks against Arizona but saw just 71 seconds of ice time.