The NHL is about to open its shortest season since 1942, but the Blackhawks don’t intend to be holding the short straw this time.
One of the teams that may have benefitted from the long delay, the Hawks are going to have to fight through a tough early schedule-10 of the first 12 games on the road-but coach Darryl Sutter thinks that this time he has the tools to do it.
The team that opens Friday night in Detroit is a far different group than the one that started the 1993-94 season.
“I think we’re more capable of winning a 5-4 game,” says Sutter, “and we still haven’t changed enough that we can’t win a 2-1 game.”
Sutter was looking for more offense-a half-goal a game more offense-and with late-season trades and off-season acquisitions he thinks he has found it.
The biggest problem last year was that once you got past the first line-whoever Jeremy Roenick was skating with was the first line-there was little scoring power.
Now, according to Roenick, “we’ve got three solid lines and a fourth line that will bug people.”
On paper that might be close to the truth.
Tony Amonte, acquired from the New York Rangers late last season, and Patrick Poulin, a midseason pickup from Hartford, are Roenick’s linemates this year and Sutter calls Poulin, his biggest forward and one of the fastest, “the key to what happens to our team this year. We’re giving him the ball and letting him run with it.”
Poulin spent a lot of last season in Sutter’s doghouse for his questionable work habits, but he was the club’s top goal scorer in the almost-forgotten exhibition season.
Amonte, a former high school teammate of Roenick, slumped badly last year and finished with only 17 goals, but Sutter says he’s not worried.
“Tony Amonte had a big first two years in the league,” Sutter noted. “He was a 30-plus goal man. Last year was a difficult year for him but he still would have been in the top two or three scorers on our team. We expect big things out of him and he expects big things out of himself.”
Sutter also expects big things out of his second line, which is anchored by newcomer Bernie Nicholls, once one of the game’s great scorers, now a bona fide all-around player who “gives us another element at that position,” says Sutter.
Paul Ysebaert and Joe Murphy, two players who have 35-goal seasons on their resumes, will flank Nicholls. Sutter expects Murphy in particular to benefit from being reunited with his former teammate at Edmonton.
The third and fourth lines are not quite as settled, but it appears rookie Jeff Shantz will skate with veterans Brent Sutter and Dirk Graham, while newcomer Brent Grieve will pair with Rich Sutter and Christian Ruuttu. The latter two were assured of being with the team when the Blackhawks protected them from Wednesday’s waiver draft.
For all the expected offensive improvement, the heart of any Darryl Sutter team is defense and this team has plenty of it, starting with two-time Norris Trophy winner Chris Chelios, and including veterans like Gary Suter, Steve Smith and Eric Weinrich and developing young defensemen like Cam Russell and Keith Carney.
Smith and Russell, both coming off injuries, are at full strength, thanks in part to the delayed opening of the season. “Any time you have a healthy corps of defensemen who are all veterans it has a stabilizing effect,” says Sutter.
Then, of course, there’s goalie Ed Belfour, who Roenick calls simply, “the best.”
In a short season Belfour, who is willing and quite possibly able to play all 48 games, could be the ultimate weapon. But if he misses any significant time there is no proven backup and the Blackhawks would be looking down the barrel of a long season.
