Jonathan Toews not scoring isn't why the Blackhawks lost
Jonathan Toews did not score a goal for the Chicago Blackhawks in their first round loss to the St. Louis Blues. That is not why they lost.
By
Adam Gretz
•
6 min read
Let's talk about Jonathan Toews and the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Usually this discussion ends with us looking back at the Blackhawks' latest championship and how Toews willed his team to another title through his relentless two-way play and unmatched leadership.
He is one of best hockey players in the world. The list of names ahead of him is a short one. You could probably count them on just one hand. He is a fantastic defensive forward (one of the best in the NHL) a really good offensive player, the captain of the best team in the NHL's salary cap era, and a player that has scored his share of big goals in the postseason on their way to three Stanley Cups in seven years.
That resume has helped him be built into some kind of mythical hockey god-like playoff machine that is expected to score every big goal in every big game because that is what he does. Things reached their most absurd level at the start of Game 7 when analyst Pierre McGuire was on the NBCSN broadcast going on and on at the start of the game about Toews' ability to send a message in Game 7's, both last year and this year, by winning the opening faceoff. In all seriousness, that is perhaps the least impactful moment in a hockey game unless somebody scores within the first 10 seconds, nobody is sending a message at that point in the game.
All of that has helped create the illusion that he might actually be the best player in the world (he is not), instead of just one of the five or six best, which is what he probably really is. And there is no shame in that. He is quite possibly better than 99 percent of the players in the league right now. This is not insulting to him.
This brings us to the 2016 playoffs where the Blackhawks were not only eliminated in the first round in a Game 7 loss to the St. Louis Blues, they were eliminated while not receiving a single goal from Toews, and only one from Patrick Kane, the NHL's regular season scoring champion.
Not even 24 hours after the loss, those stat lines have not gone unnoticed. For the most part, it's pretty tame stuff, at least compared to what you would read if it was, say, Alex Ovechkin facing that situation. Nobody is really out for blood here. It's mostly just surprise that, hey, Jonathan Toews didn't score in the playoffs or come through at the big moment and we didn't really see that coming.
The harshest criticism probably came from Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune:
An excerpt:
The captain plays in too many situations and takes too many shifts to go scoreless and have people expect the Hawks to win.
I don’t want to hear how remarkable it is that the Hawks managed to force the series to seven games while Toews and Patrick Kane combined for one goal. The Hawks are not about pushing a series to seven games. The Hawks are not about moral victories. The Hawks are about winning Cups, and they won’t come close when they get one goal combined from the $20 million faces of the franchise.
We love to build players into something they are not. With Toews, it's the idea that he always gets the big goal in the big game. When they fail to reach that expectation, we tear them back down and criticizie them for, well, falling short of the expectation we set for them.
I have argued before (on this very site) that the success of the Blackhawks is not just about them having Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane on their team. They help. They have been a big part of it.
You can not win a championship without players like them.
You also can not with a championship by only having them.
You also need the supporting cast around them, because no matter how good they are, they are not always going to score. This is the five-goals-per-game NHL, where the winning team on most nights only gets two or three goals, and with only so many goals to go around sometimes your best players are going to get shut down and shut out. What has separated the Blackhawks from every other team in the NHL that has one or two superstars in recent years is the fact they have always had a supporting cast around their two superstars that can make up for it when they don't score.
Since the Blackhawks won their first Cup in the Toews/Kane era, those two have scored an awful lot of playoff goals for the team. They have also had a lot of games where one of them did not score. And quite a few games (more than people probably realize) where neither one of them scored.
And the team still won a lot of those games.
When the Blackhawks won the Cup in 2013, they went through the first 20 games of that postseason (which put them three games deep into the Stanley Cup Final against the Boston Bruins) getting only one goal from Toews and only five from Kane (with three of them coming in a single game).
If you look at the three Stanley Cup winning teams from this era (2010, 2013 and 2015) there were 27 out of 70 playoff games when Toews and Kane were both held without a goal. That is nearly 40 percent of the games. That is a lot.
The Blackhawks' record in those games: 19-8.
19. And. 8. That is a 70 percent winning percentage.
They were able to do that because those teams were absolutely loaded. The 2010 team, along with having Toews, Kane, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, also had a still-in-his-prime Marian Hossa, Patrick Sharp, Andrew Ladd, Dustin Byfuglien, Kris Versteeg and Brian Campbell playing on it. The 2013 team had the regular core guys, and then receive a stunning postseason performance from a role player like Bryan Bickell where he scored nine goals and had 17 points.
You didn't notice when Toews and Kane didn't score because there were not only 10 other guys that could, but they would also shut teams down defensively.
That is where this year's version of the Blackhawks ended up falling short. The supporting cast simply was not there.
Even though he had a big series for them, Marian Hossa has noticeably slowed down up front. Sharp, a player that scored his share of big goals for the Blackhawks in recent years, is now doing the same for Dallas. Other than Andrew Shaw's four goals, nobody in the bottom six really made an impact in any noticeable way.
But that doesn't even get into their biggest issue: The defense.
Along with having their usual question mark on their bottom pairing, they were really missing one big piece in their top-four after not replacing Johnny Oduya, while Seabrook clearly is not the player he once was. You just can't win in the playoffs by only having three reliable defensemen you can count on.
When we look back on this series we'll look at the goose egg next to Toews' name in the goal column and the one next to Kane and wonder what might have happened if they had scored one or two more goals in a series that literally came down to a matter of inches in more than one game.
In a different year the Blackhawks probably would have found enough goals or done enough to prevent more to keep their postseason run alive and give Toews and Kane more opportunities to score that big goal everybody expected. And they would have been celebrated for it when it ultimately happened while nobody noticied or remembered what happened earlier in the playoffs.
The difference this year is the team itself simply had too many other holes to allow them to get to that point.
