The Teuvo Teravainen experiment lasted for a grand total of two games, but it appears that he will be heading up to the press box on Thursday night when the Chicago Blackhawks take on the Minnesota Wild.
Daniel Carcillo will be rejoining Chicago’s lineup after being a healthy scratch for their last two games, and it appears as though he will replace Teravainen in the bottom six forward group. Joel Quenneville has said that he wants more out of Carcillo, who has four goals, three assists, and 30 penalty minutes in 28 games so far this season.
In his two games in the lineup, Teravainen was held off the scoresheet, playing an average of 10:29 per game and bouncing around with several line combinations at both even strength and on the power play.
The Carcillo vs. Teravainen debate will surely be one that will be held among Blackhawks fans as Thursday’s game is going on, but the team has more pressing things to deal with. After a long stretch of excellent hockey, the Hawks have cooled off a bit recently, going 4-3-1 in their last eight games. That includes a 2-0 loss to the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday that saw Chicago give up two goals in fewer than two minutes and then fail to score a goal of their own despite attempting 92 shots in the game.
If the Blackhawks are going to bounce back from that tough loss, then they are going to need to do several things right. First and foremost on that list of course is that they need to start the game much better than they have in recent weeks. Over the last six games, the Blackhawks have conceded the first goal in each contest, and while they’ve come on strong in the third period of most of those games, continually going down early in games, especially on the road, is a recipe for disaster.
The other thing that the Blackhawks will need to do in this one is to get more traffic to the front of the net. A lot of their opportunities against Colorado, especially early in the game, were one-and-done chances, with Semyon Varlamov getting a wide open view of what was coming. When guys like Ben Smith and Jonathan Toews started crashing the net, the chances for rebounds came fast and furious, and although Chicago lost the game ultimately, they were doing the right things by the time the final horn sounded.
Netfront traffic and a strong start are two things that Quenneville and company always preach, but considering how both factors would have helped the Hawks to a win in their last game, it’s more important tonight that the team listens to the coach’s advice.
