Unlike baseball or basketball, where road trips are just necessary annoyances, in hockey a trip is a chance to “bond.” For whatever reason, hockey reveres its bonding experiences.
“For us, we’re together 24/7,” Hawks center Mark Bell said. “We’re together all the time when we’re on the road. We eat together, go to movies together. You get to find out more about a person when you’re on the road with them.”
It’s safe to assume that by now, there is little the Hawks don’t know about each other, having completed a stretch Thursday in Nashville in which they played 20 of their first 30 games away from the United Center.
At the start, the goal was just to survive the first 30, be at or near .500 and hopefully within striking distance of a Western Conference playoff spot.
After Thursday’s 5-3 loss to the Nashville Predators, the break-even mark moved one more game into the distance and a playoff spot this season appeared more precarious.
Beginning Friday, the Hawks will play 16 of their next 21 games at home in what could be termed a make-or-break portion of their schedule if they are to challenge for a postseason berth.
As important is the fact that 16 of the 21 will be against Western Conference opponents–the so-called “four-point” games.
“We know what’s in front of us,” Bell said. “We know that these [conference] games are huge for us.”
For the third straight game on this last trip until Jan. 2-3, the Hawks quickly took the lead and then watched it disappear.
Bell put the Hawks on the board 2 minutes 29 seconds into the NHL career of Nashville goalie Pekka Rinne, who was making his first start after being called up from Milwaukee of the AHL.
The goal came short-handed, the first of the year for the Hawks, the last NHL team to register one.
It went downhill from there as the Predators, losers of three straight coming in, scored four unanswered goals until Tyler Arnason scored 2:26 into the third period.
Anton Babchuk scored his first NHL goal four minutes later to make it 4-3, but then former Hawk Steve Sullivan scored a short-handed goal at 12:15, the sixth short-handed goal the Hawks have given up this season.
Dump-ins
Rene Bourque, who has been bothered by a hip flexor injury, was scratched Thursday along with defenseman Adrian Aucoin, who still is bothered by a groin injury that has cost him a third of the season. . . . The Hawks’ struggling power play is 3 for its last 31 after Thursday’s 0-for-9. . . . The good news in Nashville is that attendance is up 16 percent from the 2003-04 season. But the Predators, with the 10th-best record in the NHL, drew just 11,701 Thursday and are averaging 13,795 per game, nearly 1,000 fewer than the Hawks. The Hawks came into play Thursday averaging 14,807 a game and sporting the 24th-best record in the league. . . .
Hawks coach Trent Yawney said defenseman Jassen Cullimore, on injured reserve with a groin injury, began skating again and that Tuomo Ruutu’s back injury is making progress. But Yawney didn’t want to speculate on when Ruutu would begin skating again.
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rfoltman@tribune.com
