5 reasons the Blackhawks are going from No. 1 seed to missing the playoffs

The Chicago Blackhawks have run out of answers to the same old questions. Why did that defenseman pinch so aggressively? When will Corey Crawford come back? What’s wrong with Brandon Saad? How did last year’s No. 1 seed in the West become one of the worst teams in the NHL?

The team, which lost its eighth consecutive game Thursday night, is clearly at a loss to fix this. “I don’t know if it’s the situation we’re in or what, but it seems like we’re lacking that confidence,” Saad said after the 3-2 defeat to the Anaheim Ducks. A disappointing stretch has snowballed into a crater so deep the Blackhawks stand no chance of digging out.

Chicago’s playoff odds have dropped to just 0.4 percent, according to Hockey-Reference. Their chances of landing the No. 1 overall pick and the right to draft wunderkind defenseman Rasmus Dahlin are far better at an estimated 6.7 percent, per Tankathon.com. The Hawks’ chances of landing a top-three pick are already over 20 percent.

That’s not where the team intended to be this season, though, despite an active summer that saw veterans like Niklas Hjalmarsson, Brian Campbell, Artemi Panarin, and Scott Darling depart. Those were moves designed to keep the team competitive on the fly.

But now 2017-18 looks like a transition year more than anything, with the bright spots coming from young players such as Nick Schmaltz, Alex DeBrincat, and Vinnie Hinostroza. Here’s a look at some of the factors that have contributed to the Blackhawks’ downfall.

There’s been a lot of debate about the value of Crawford over the years, but the past few months should’ve laid to rest any question about his importance to the Blackhawks. The goaltender has been their best player for the past several seasons, papering over the team’s decline across the rest of its roster.

The same goes for earlier this season, when the Hawks were already displaying many of their flaws, but Crawford was good enough to keep the team in the playoff mix. There’s a real chance that he would’ve been a contender to win the Vezina Trophy had he stayed healthy.

Even now after all that missed time, Crawford remains seventh in the NHL in Goals Saved Above Average at plus-17.58, per Corsica. That’s how good he was in those 28 games (.929 save percentage) before leaving with a mysterious head injury, and the team’s other goalies haven’t come close to duplicating it (.903) since he went down.

Jonathan Toews, Brent Seabrook, Patrick Kane, and Duncan Keith used to form a core that was the envy of the rest of the NHL. But it’s no longer 2013, and the Blackhawks still want to lean on those four in the same way they always have. The problem is, outside of Kane, it seems apparent at this point that aging is catching up to them.

Toews, whose $10.5 million cap hit is tied with Kane for highest in the league, is on pace for a bit over 50 points this season. He remains a strong two-way center who can play in all situations, but his offensive decline over the past few seasons has become a problem given how much of their cap space he eats up.

It’s a similar problem on defense with Seabrook and Keith. The latter remains a solid top-pairing defenseman even though he clearly doesn’t have the same legs as he used to, but Seabrook looks like a fraction of himself on the ice. And while the coaching staff has at times worked to ease the load on Seabrook to make him more effective, he’s averaged nearly 22 minutes per game this month. Unsurprisingly it hasn’t gone great.

These four players are still being used like the core stars of the roster, which makes sense given they’re paid that way, but it’s not clear they’re all good enough to fill those roles on a contender anymore.

Here’s a list of players to appear on the Blackhawks’ defense this season: Jan Rutta, Erik Gustafsson, Gustav Forsling, Jordan Oesterle, Cody Franson, Carl Dahlstrom, and Michal Kempny. If the point of sorting through all of those places was to try to find a stable, functional defense, then Joel Quenneville remains on the search.

With the decline of Keith and Seabrook on the back end, Chicago needed some of these players to step up. They’ve tried, too, whether it’s Oesterle’s extended foray on the top line or the month where Forsling-Rutta was aggressively used as a shutdown pairing. But each lineup play has come with problems, and now it’s too late in the season to feel like this will get solved.

The Blackhawks’ “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” strategy to building their defense really hasn’t panned out.

The Blackhawks have scored power play goals in six of the last seven games, yet they’re still just No. 29 in success rate at 15.9 percent. That’s how bad they’ve been with the man advantage this season: Even after arguably their best stretch of the season, they’re still among the league’s worst in those situations.

This has been particularly damaging to the Blackhawks because they’re the best team in the NHL at drawing penalties. They’ve spent over 22 more minutes on the power play than any other team, too. Theoretically this should yield a massive advantage for the Blackhawks, but they’re just 19th in power play goals because their efficiency is so poor.

With players like Kane, Toews, Saad, Keith, Schmaltz, and DeBrincat, there’s no reason for the Blackhawks’ power play to be so ineffective. The team fired assistant coach Mike Kitchen last year partially for his handling of the penalty kill. It wouldn’t be shocking if Kevin Dineen, the assistant who primarily coaches the power play, gets the ax this time around.

As you can tell from the Saad quote in the introduction, the losing has started to get to the Blackhawks. It’s a stark contrast from the “never say never” attitude that led to countless comebacks during their heyday.

Only one team in the NHL has a worse goal differential when trailing this season, which isn’t like past Hawks teams. During the 2013 lockout-shortened season, the team posted an astonishing 69 percent goals for percentage when the other team was winning. This season, that figure has plummeted to 42 percent.

The inability to muster the intensity to rally upon trailing seems reflective of a team that no longer believes in itself like it used to. And with so many new faces in the locker room compared to a year ago, a lot of these players haven’t been there and done that like the veterans. It’s clear this team doesn’t have the mental fortitude that it used to.