“12. After throwing him to the wolves to start the season, the Chicago Blackhawks have done a much better job lately of shielding Connor Bedard from tougher assignments. Jason Dickinson proving himself as a viable shutdown center option helped with that and Chicago took it a step further on Tuesday by putting Bedard on Dickinson’s wing.
The end result was Bedard’s strongest showing of the season based on expected goals. With Bedard on the ice, the Blackhawks won the expected goals battle 2.0-0.1, good for 94 percent of the expected goals which was a season high for Bedard. That’s more like it and the feat is all the more impressive given what the Blackhawks did otherwise. The rest of the team was outchanced by an expected goals margin of 1.9 to 0.9.”
2 comments
Dickinson is such a gem. Putting him with bedard is not unlike when Q used to put competent centers to go get pucks and play defense for Kane.
It’ll be interesting to see if they still do it at home when they can dictate matchups. The last 4 road games they’ve put Dickinson and Bedard together (if not for the whole game, large stretches), but when they played at home against the Flames in that stretch, they separated them. Dallas is a good team throughout their lineup, but there’s one clear line in Robertson-Hintz-Pavelski to either dodge/match up with, so it’ll be interesting to see if A) they keep them together at all, and B) if they do keep them together, if they try to force that Dickinson vs. Hintz matchup, or let that line run wild on the rest of the lineup and have Dickinson and Bedard go more against the rest of the lineup, which is what Bedard is accustomed to at home.