Needless to say, the mood of Chicago Blackhawks fans is much darker after two straight shutout losses on home ice, and if the team’s recent history is any indication, the argument for pessimism is well founded.
Since the league expanded to 12 teams in the 1960’s, the Blackhawks have trailed two games to none in a series on 25 different occasions. In those series, the Blackhawks have come back to win on only two occasions, beating the St. Louis Blues in six games in 2014 and the Toronto Maple Leafs in seven games back in 1995.
In those 25 series, the Blackhawks have been swept 13 times, including a staggering run of eight sweeps in a row between the 1976 and 1983 postseasons.
When the Blackhawks have trailed two games to none after a pair of home games, the prognosis is just as dire. They’ve only trailed by that margin in a series on four different occasions prior to this season, and they’ve only won once, in the aforementioned 1995 series against the Maple Leafs. In the other three instances, they were swept out of the postseason, with the Blues, Maple Leafs, and Boston Bruins wielding the broom in those instances.
If wallowing in long odds and depressing statistics is your bag of tea, then we have one more for you: before this season, 12 teams were shutout in the first two games of a series. None of them have come back to win the series.
Even amid all of those awful statistics, there is one that Blackhawks fans can look back on and give themselves at least a bit of hope. In the last three series in which the Blackhawks have trailed by two games, they’ve come back to win two of them (vs. Detroit in 2013, vs. St. Louis in 2014) and were one goal away from winning, as they fell in overtime to the Los Angeles Kings in Game 7 of the 2014 Western Conference Final.
