SAN JOSE, Calif. — It’s not as if the Blackhawks have some sort of deep-seated hatred for the Seattle Kraken and San Jose Sharks, of all teams. There’s no history of cheap shots, no unforgettable recent playoff series. The Kraken might be the most nondescript team in the NHL, and the Sharks are early in their own rebuild.
But hey, sometimes you have to create your own narratives, your own motivations.
When the Kraken desperately needed to beat the Blackhawks on Saturday at Climate Pledge Arena in order to keep their fading playoff hopes alive, Chicago went out and effectively ended their season. The Sharks desperately needed to beat the Blackhawks on Monday at SAP Center to keep pace in a cutthroat race for the second Western Conference wild card. This time, the Blackhawks put up a spirited fight, but couldn’t deliver the body blow to San Jose’s chances, falling 3-2 in a free-flowing and fun showdown between two of the league’s youngest teams.
“You come out and try to give them your best,” defenseman Wyatt Kaiser said. “They’re trying to get there and we’re trying to not let them get there. (In 2023), we ended Pittsburgh’s season. It makes it fun, right?”
Hockey’s a zero-sum game. By playing spoiler for one team, the Blackhawks are simply helping another get in. It’s all just head games, a way to find motivation at the end of a long, grueling and disappointing season.
But San Jose is different than Seattle. The Blackhawks are well aware that the Sharks are in a similar position to them — loading up on young talent amid a long-term rebuild. Someday in the not-too-distant future, there very well might be a blood feud between these two teams.
So, these early salvos matter.
“You hear all the direct comparisons between us and the Sharks,” Kaiser said before the game. “So you definitely want to kind of ruin it for them, for sure.”
“We have no reason to hate this team,” Ryan Donato said, before loudly emphasizing the next word. “But, it’s about finding meaning in the games. Obviously, this is a team we’ve been compared to a bunch, and there are a lot of different things you can consider when you talk about Chicago vs. San Jose, so it’s easy to get excited about.”
Like Connor Bedard vs. Macklin Celebrini, both of whom are on their way to being the new faces of the league. Like Frank Nazar vs. Will Smith, seriously skilled sidekicks. Like Anton Frondell vs. Michael Misa, the third and second picks in last year’s NHL draft, both just starting out highly promising careers. Like Artyom Levshunov vs. Sam Dickinson, two promising young blue-liners. Like Spencer Knight vs. Yaroslav Askarov, two young goalies projected to become league leaders. The youngsters led the way on both sides on Monday.
Bedard had an assist and engineered maybe the best power-play night of the season for the Blackhawks, feeding Frondell and Nazar for one-timer after one-timer from up top on the new-look, five-forward top unit, which played just about every second of the team’s three power plays. The Blackhawks got a Donato goal one second after the first power-play expired, Frondell had five one-timers on the second, and Nazar scored on the third.
Unsurprisingly, Blackhawks coach Jeff Blashill said the five-forward look is here to stay.
“I’d have to be crazy not to,” he said. “I have no issue with five forwards. It doesn’t matter if it’s a forward or D back there, that doesn’t dictate whether or not you give up shorthanded chances. To me it’s about the responsibility of the group. What it does is get the puck a lot in Bedsy’s hands and he’s the guy you want with the puck in his hands.”
The Blackhawks’ Frank Nazar and the Sharks’ Michael Misa are two of the budding, young stars featured on both up-and-coming teams. (David Gonzales / Imagn Images)
Like Bedard, Celebrini only had a secondary assist. But also like Bedard, he was a menace all night, as always. The Sharks also got goals from young guns William Eklund and Smith, both top-10 picks. The hyper-aggressive Sharks seemingly turned every minor mistake the Blackhawks made into an odd-man rush the other way. That opportunistic style has them right on the edge of the playoff picture.
The West has a crowded field, for sure, and progress is never linear. But it’s not difficult to envision future conference finals between these two teams.
“Especially with the plethora of young guys that we have and they have, the way the teams are drafting and developing and all this stuff, it shows the competitiveness of the organizations,” Donato said. “We want to be one of those teams that said we made the right moves, we drafted the right guys, we made the right decisions, and that’s why we’re getting paid off for it.”
The Sharks seemed to skip a step in the rebuild this year, moving straight into playoff contention as Celebrini rocketed to megastardom in his second season. San Jose is now two points out of the wild card while Chicago is two points out of 30th place. But the teams are closer than the standings suggest. San Jose has been an overtime juggernaut, going 12-7 in overtime and shootouts, while the Blackhawks are 7-14. Even those out, and the teams would be neck and neck. There’s no three-on-three overtime or shootouts in the playoffs, so the regular-season standings can inflate a team’s worth. The Sharks only have two more regulation wins than the Blackhawks do. And San Jose’s goal differential of minus-36 would be dead last in the Eastern Conference.
The Sharks also play in the worst division in hockey, while the Blackhawks have to face the Avalanche, Stars and Wild on a regular basis. It’s a fine line between excuse and fact.
“You go through a lot of the teams in the West, you compare overtime records and shootout records, ours haven’t been good enough, and some of these teams have gained a lot of ground that way, and that makes a huge difference in points,” Blashill said. “I know where we’ve been at. We obviously suffered a couple critical injuries in the middle of the year (Bedard and Nazar) when I thought we were in a really good spot. We weren’t able to keep our head above water in those moments. Whatever, you go through it. We’ve been involved in tons of games that we had opportunities to win, and we haven’t won enough of them. But that is also for me part of the growth process of an extraordinarily young team.”
That’s why Blashill seemed a little more frustrated with Chicago’s play on Monday night than the eye test would suggest. It was another near-miss, another not-good-enough. To keep pace with the Sharks next year and beyond, Chicago needs to find the finishing kick that San Jose seems to have found.
In the meantime, every game between these two teams — including the season finale next week at the United Center — will carry a little more juice than the standings might suggest.
“Any time we get to play these guys is a look at what it is in the future,” Nazar said. “It’s the team that we’re going to be battling against for the next 10 years.”