Sports with Megs

CHICAGO, IL -- So, we've reached the end of the season, and I've done mid-season report cards , and I've graded the rookies on their first seasons with the Hawks. How'd the other guys fare by the end of the season, though? It's a shorter list, but I figured I'd just grade out the rest of the Hawks players for the last half of the season. You know the deal: 1) Have played 15+ games with the Blackhawks this season 2) Are currently under the salary cap 3) Have not been traded away Let's hop right in! Forwards: Patrick Kane (81 GP, 44-66--110 PTS): Previous grade: A+; Final grade: A+, MVP) I'm sticking with Kane's A+ and MVP status on the season, because he's the exact reason the Hawks even had a fighting chance to get into the playoffs through the last half of the season. He had a career year, smashing his career high of 106 points and carrying this team as far as he could. His time on ice (TOI) was one of the highest on t...

CHICAGO, IL — After a nice finish on the season with wins over the St. Louis Blues and Dallas Stars (and a loss to the Nashville Predators that we're going to ignore), the Blackhawks are officially in the off-season. The team held their annual locker room clean out, and I thought there were a lot of great takeaways from the clean out day. Obviously, the Hawks didn’t finish where they wanted to, but I think that was made up for when they moved from the 12th overall pick to the 3rd pick in the 2019 NHL Draft Lottery that took place on Tuesday. I’ll probably do a quick piece on who the Hawks should be looking at and what their options are for the draft in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that. But, in the meantime, lets go over some of the topics that came up in the clean out presser. IIHF World Championship The past couple of years, a handful of Blackhawks players have participated in the IIHF World Championship, which takes place in early May. A coup...

CHICAGO, IL -- Well, we've reached the end of the road, boys. If you haven't heard, the Blackhawks were eliminated from playoff contention with the Colorado Avalanche's win over the Oilers on Tuesday. I'm not going to lie, it's been a fun season. There have been definite highs and lows this season, and at the end of the day, the Hawks are ending on a higher note than they expected to. This season really has been a whirlwind for this team--there was a relatively big group of new guys at the start of the season (Brandon Manning, Chris Kunitz, Cam Ward, Henri Jokiharju, Andreas Martinsen, to name a few), and while some of them didn't stick around, they all left a mark on the team--good or bad, that's for you to decide. Coach Quenneville was fired fairly abruptly in the midst of what would be an eight-game losing streak in early November, and the Hawks brought in rookie coach Jeremy Colliton to replace him. Colliton really has grown on me this season...

CHICAGO, IL -- I know I did a quick measure of the entire Blackhawks roster back in February, but I thought since the season is likely coming to a close (save for a miracle), it might be nice to get an idea of where the newbies and rookies to the Hawks roster are. For this article, I did create some guidelines, like I did with the mid-season report cards (end of season report cards are coming soon, by the way!). This isn't really going to be a report card, but more of just my general thoughts on how the player is doing in his first season with the Hawks--I'll give a more specific/"graded" report in the post-season report cards article. The basic guidelines are as follows: Must be currently on the Hawks roster (not in Rockford) Must have played less than 82 NHL games OR less than 82 games with the Blackhawks (all stats will be just for this season to make things easy) Must be their first full year playing with the Blackhawks With that out of...

CHICAGO, IL — The Blackhawks and NHL recently released information regarding the 2019-20 NHL Global Series, and our boys are shipping off to Europe to start the season next year. This had kind of been floating around for a couple of weeks, but the league made it official just yesterday—the Blackhawks will play an exhibition game in Berlin, and they’ll play their first game of the season in Prague. They haven’t released who the Hawks are playing against in Berlin, but they’re set to take on the Philadelphia Flyers in Prague to open the season. The Buffalo Sabres and Tampa Bay Lightning are also set to play overseas, and will open their seasons in Sweden. The league hosted a Global Series last year that took the Boston Bruins to China, and the Winnipeg Jets and Florida Panthers to Finland—and it was wildly popular. The Jets and Panthers game pitted Finland-natives Patrik Laine and Aleksander Barkov against each other, and it was a pretty extraordinary match-up. I perso...

CHICAGO, IL — I’m going to be absolutely real with you—I had no idea what to write about for the blog this week. I’ve written about the Blackhawks being good, bad, and everything in between, I’ve written about Patrick Kane a couple times now (#Kane4Hart), and I’ve even written about the best goal celebrations from the Hawks this season. The idea tank is running dry, my friends. So, I thought we could throw it back to a post I made a while back about what the Hawks really needed to do to make the playoffs, and grade them on how well they're meeting all three of those items a couple of weeks later. Let's just get right on into it, shall we? 1) With 27 games left, you have to go 18-9 to get to the 88-90-point range that would potentially get them into the playoffs. So, the Hawks currently sit at 71 points through 70 games, and since the date of this article (February 8th), the Hawks have gone 9-6, which is not terrible, but also only gives them a b...

CHICAGO, IL -- Well, folks, we are nearing the end of the 2018-19 regular season. It's really mind-blowing how fast time's gone--there are just fifteen games left for the Blackhawks to try and fight their way back into the playoffs. But, that's not really what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about the one player the Hawks have desperately needed this season to produce, and the one player who went above and beyond to do so. We're talking about Patrick Kane, in case there was any confusion. As we near the end of the season, NHL awards talk seems to pop up on my Twitter timeline more and more frequently. There are talks of the Norris (best defenseman), the Vezina (best goaltender), the Jack Adams (best coach), etc. The one that's talked about the most frequently, usually, is the Hart Trophy--aka, the MVP trophy. There are a lot people arguing that Nikita Kucherov of Tampa Bay Lightning royalty should be a shoo-in for the Hart t...

CHICAGO, IL -- I spoke too soon, didn't I? Dang it. Jinxed it. But, you know what? As sloppy as the Stars game looked and as annoyed as I was that they lost to Colorado, I still don't think those two games were the end-all, be-all. Sure, the Hawks are sitting pretty far back in the standings, but who can really count them out at this point? With Corey Crawford returning (!!!), the power play running hot, Patrick Kane still hot, and a team that's finally learning to fight back and believe in themselves? I think they might be onto something. I know I'm preaching to the choir at this point, I really am. I've said all of this a gazillion times before on this blog, harping on all of the good things that have come out of the end of January and all of February. But, as we go into March, historically the worst month for the Hawks, it's hard not to suspect that this March won't be any different. But, I think they're in a good spot. They...

CHICAGO, IL -- Oh. Oh my god. The Blackhawks--your Chicago Blackhawks--were in a playoff spot for about 45 minutes Wednesday night. Yes, the same team that was in dead last on January 19th, a little over a month ago, is that close to a playoff spot. If you told me a month ago that they'd be here, I would laugh in your face. They're not a perfect team by any means, but the way they've been playing the past month has been insane. They've won ten of their last twelve, which is absurd. Both goalies and the defense look astronomically better than they did a month ago--again, not perfect, but better--and the offense has finally flipped a switch. It also really helps that the rest of the Western Conference is meh at best. They're currently in a race with Colorado (who took the playoff spot from the Hawks a mere 45 minutes after their game ended, after the Avalanche routed the Winnipeg Jets 7-1), Arizona, Vancouver, and Minnesota. None of these te...