Was the Blackhawks Last Victory over The Penguins the Most Influential Regular Season Game of the Draft Lottery Era?
Hey, a hockey post!
Despite the site's tagline, I haven't written much purely about hockey. But after the Stanley Cup Final, it occurred to me haw conditional everything in sports is. Not a new revelation, of course, but as a Blackhawks fan, the way luck plays out in the fate of sports teams was intimately connected to one of the teams in the final.
On April 11th, the Blackhawks and Penguins faced off in Pittsburgh near the end of the season. The Hawks were a team built to be terrible. The aging curve and poor salary cap management (for those who do not know, the NHL is a hard cap league -- teams have a set amount of money to spend on players with almost no exceptions outside of injury) had closed the championship window for the team. They had sold off every player not nailed down at the trade deadline or before, brought in goalies with a history of being bad (though those goalies turned out to be much better than expected when healthy -- there's that luck again), and refused to bring up their young prospects for the most part. All that was left of their glory days were the three championship banners in the rafters and an aging Johnathon Toews -- once a two-way beast, but now brought low by Father Time and an illness related to long Covid. Going into the game, the Hawks had won just once since St. Patrick's Day. And that was fine with management -- finishing dead last gave them the best odds to win the right to draft the next generational superstar in waiting. At a minimum, even if they lost the lottery, they could not fall so far as to lose out on one of the other almost guaranteed all-star caliber players in an incredibly deep draft.
The Penguins were a much more desperate team. They'd had a similar run of success over a similar time period as the Hawks, but they had managed the cap much better and time had been gentler to some of their key players. And to be fair, they had Sidney Crosby, the best player of his generation, and the Hawks did not. The Penguins were all in on more runs with this same group of players, giving long term contract extensions to aging stars. But it had not gone to plan. Father Time stalked this team, with significant injuries to two of the three core players, and the rest of the team not being able to provide proper support, the Penguins had drifted along the edge of playoff qualification all season. Still, with two games to play going into the Hawks game, wins in both would almost certainly guarantee their spot in the playoffs and hold off a hard charging Florida Panthers team.
The Penguins completely outplayed the Hawks for the first two periods, but an outstanding performance by one of the goalies, Petr Mrazek, brought in to lose, gave the Hawks the lead heading into the third. But these were the Penguins. Three-time champions with the greatest player of his generation still playing at a high level. One of the core three superstars tied the game early in the third, and the building erupted. Surely, surely the team was about to take over and save their playoff aspirations.
But the Hawks wouldn't go away. Mrazek would not let the winning goal past and a journeymen player, Buddy Robinson, a man who had been on four teams since 2015 but only managed to play in a total of 61 games -- significantly less than a full season -- scored the go-ahead goal with about ten minutes left in the game. Twenty-six seconds later, the Haws scored again. By the time they were done, they had scored a total of four goals in that last ten minutes of play. The Hawks won 5-2.
That loss, coupled with Buffalo's the same night, put Florida in the playoffs. Pittsburgh still had a chance, but they no longer controlled their own destiny. The next night, the New York Islanders beat another team playing out the season, like the Hawks, and the Penguins were out of the playoffs, their last game meaningless.
The Blackhawks did what they were supposed to do in their last game, lost, but the loss came in overtime -- an overtime forced by their aging, ill captain, Johnaton Toews, in his last game as a Blackhawk (Toews is a free agent the team made it clear before the end of the season that they would not bring him back, even assuming his health allows him to continue to play). The last two games proved that while organizations tank, players and coaches certainly do not. The Hawk would end up with the third worst record in hockey because of their win in Pittsburgh, not the worst record. Because of the way the draft lottery works, the Hawks were more likely to draft fourth or fifth than third, pushing them out of the territory where consensus sure fire stars would be found. It looked like their rebuild would be significantly set back, that all of the terrible play was for nothing.
And then, at the lottery, they won. They were going to get the next consensus generational talent, accelerating their path back to the Stanley Cup. That win in Pittsburgh saved their rebuild.
That makes the game consequential for the Hawks, of course, but that hardly makes it the most consequential game of the lottery era. For that we need to look at the other teams affected by it. Pittsburgh, of course, missed the playoffs and fired their GM, hiring Kyle Dubas when he was let go in Toronto. The consensus seems to be that Pittsburgh got much the better of that exchange.
The Panthers then went on a run as the eight seed all the way the Stanly Cup Final. In the process they game back from down three games to one in the first round to the Boston Bruins -- a team that had gone all in to win it all this year. The Bruins replaced their coach, brought back aging veterans, spent to the cap and produced, by wins and by points (teams in the NHL get points for winning and points for losing in overtime, a relic of when there were ties and teams would split the points available in a game), the best regular season in history. In the second round, they beat a Toronto team that had finally, finally advanced into the second round with a cast of all stars of its own that had never been able to get out of the first round in the previous seven years. As mentioned, he fallout from that was Toronto firing its well-regarded up and coming general manger. The swept through the Conference finals, elevating their star player to the point where he was getting profiles in Vanity Fair -- a marketing coup for North America's most bland league. When they did finally lose in the Final, they lost to a team coached by the Bruins former coach. The Panthers, who looked like a disaster at the start of the season, now look like perennial contenders.
The fate of five franchises radically altered by one game. What's the lesson? Luck has as much to do with success as your best laid plans. And if you're a Hawks fan, third-worst is your favorite non-Championship place to be.