The Blackhawks capped a terrible weekend in California by losing 7-1 to the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday night.

Let’s summarize the game thusly:

Arvid Söderblom has given up seven goals.

He’s also made a career-high 46 saves.

— Mark Lazerus (@marklazerus.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 9:33 PM

No, we’re not going to look at any of the seven goals Anaheim scored. We will look at the one Chicago scored, which was from Tyler Bertuzzi but came long after the outcome had been decided:

Goal: Andre Burakovsky scores a huge goal to cut the lead down to five pic.twitter.com/6nOuFshhqa

— BHF (@BlackhawksFocus) December 8, 2025

It was a bad time. Let’s get to the notes.

Notes

During the second period of this game, Darren Pang suggested that the Hawks looked like a “tired group” to him. I’ll be honest: my initial thought was to dismiss that as being overly apologetic for a team that’s just not playing good hockey right now. But reading through some other social media chatter about the game and then a quick back-and-forth with Sam Fels had me reconsidering that dismissal of Pang’s comments.

Given the intense schedule and so many doing this for the first time, it’s probably not a stretch.

— Sam Fels But Who’s Buyin’? (@felsgate.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 8:28 PM

This was Chicago’s 29th game of the season. Go back to last year and Rockford played its 21st game on Dec. 7 last season, where Frank Nazar and Artyom Levshunov were playing a full professional season for the first time. Boston University played its 15th game on Dec. 7, where Ryan Greene was skating. Oliver Moore and Sam Rinzel were at the University of Minnesota, and it played Game No. 18 on Dec. 7. Colton Dach has already more than doubled his NHL experience (25 games) prior to this season. That’s one-third of the lineup from this game and several of those players have fairly large roles on the team, yet they’ve never played this many games in such a short window of time before. So, yeah, heavy legs could be a part of this, given that it was the tail end of a back-to-back and Chicago’s seventh game in 12 nights. The good news is that younger bodies tend to bounce back faster, Chicago has plenty of those, and the Hawks will have multiple days off in a row during each of the next three weeks. Whatever the hell this has been lately could be coming to a swift end after this game — or, at least, that’s the hope.

Somewhat related to those thoughts: there was some player within the last few years — I want to say it was someone from the Calgary Flames but I could be wrong and I spent much of the third period trying to find this quote via Google with zero luck — who said that the biggest difference between playing in the NHL and playing in virtually every other league around the world is that the NHL consistently plays games on weekdays, and that learning how to withstand that grind often decides the success or failure of an NHL career. This weekend suggests that’s still a work in progress for many of the Hawks, which isn’t a problem for now. A strong performance in the Hawks’ next game would help reaffirm that weekend was more of an anomaly than signs of deeper issues.

Even in a completely lopsided game, Connor Bedard still had a moment where he did something cool:

This is a really nifty forecheck move by Bedard. Bait the defender to go one way with the stick then seal him off with a hip-check when he does pic.twitter.com/6k46vWXSRB

— BHF (@BlackhawksFocus) December 8, 2025

Bedard also picked up a point on Bertuzzi’s goal which means that he still hasn’t gone consecutive games without a point this season. He’s currently on pace for a 113 points.

That’s about all we need to say from this game. Let’s otherwise pretend this weekend never happened!

Game Charts

Three Stars

What’s Next

The Blackhawks have two days off before hosting the New York Rangers at the United Center on Wednesday night at 6:30 p.m.