Blackhawks Glacier Slow But Effective

Tommie Lee
Oct 18, 2014
3 min read

Hockey is like a glacier.Massive sheets of ice, where great struggles play out between opposing forces seeking to carve their own impression into the landscape.

How far is our glacier capable of moving in one week?

It can move to 2-0-1.

The Blackhawks have begun the season with two wins and an overtime loss. On the ice, they look like they’re moving at a slow pace. That’s because they are. However, it’s not the first time we’ve seen this.

It’s hardly the time to start panicking, either.

Glaciers are slow, but they chew up almost everything in their path. They carve out rivers, or The Great Lakes. They are big, they are strong and they can’t be ignored. They can dominate the landscape, stand hundreds of feet high, and make everyone around them aspire to find a way to pull on their inner strength and try to conquer them.

After a glacier has the chance to build up momentum — and has spent some time under the sun — it can move faster. Hopefully this will be the case, and very soon. Because on the flip side, a glacier also has the capacity to keep moving slowly, seemingly going nowhere, and eventually start retreating.

The Blackhawks Glacier is on the move. It slides into United Center again Saturday night to face Nashville. This is a mid-level Predators team looking to prove something and speed up their own force of nature in the league.

SO, WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK?

Corey Crawford. Wow. The season-opener in Dallas was a series of Crow Says NO! moments that gave him a tally of 34 saves and only 2 goals against. Crow’s ability to steal goals away from the Stars led Coach Quenneville to remark that the police needed to be called because we stole two goals. He called the opener “a goalie win.”

That high begat a higher one back home. Patrick Kane’s childhood fave the Sabres came to town for what we all suspected would be an ugly beatdown. In the third period, we got a beatdown that resembled the one Joe Pesci took in Casino. Kaner led the way with Chicago’s third goal of the night, and there were three more to come before regulation ended and the aluminum bat was dropped. The 6-2 win included a PPG and a short-hander. Nice.

2-0, life is good, right? Well, if you looked deeper, you saw strange line decisions and sloppy skating. It isn’t easy to complain about a 2-0 team, but we had a few confused reasons to do so.

And the next thing you know, the slow start knocked us off our skates a bit when we failed to put away Calgary, and the Flames snared an OT win.

Are we in trouble? No. On Chicago’s worst day, the team is still better than, say, the Florida Panthers are on their best day.

Just ask their fans.

If you can locate one anywhere.

How crazy was THAT story this week?

Just over 7,000 fans in the stands for a game at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla. Lowest attendance for an NHL game in years. The Montreal Expos of Hockey. Brutal. Remember, that team contended for a Cup once, within most of our lifetimes. They had great players and smart managers. They just didn’t know how to maintain that quality, and now they’re suffering for it.

Be thankful for what we have, we Blackhawks fans. We were somewhat horrible not too long ago, too.

Go Hawks!