RALEIGH, N.C. — Nick Lardis isn’t sitting around doing roster math in his head, scouring Cap Wages to see who’s waiver eligible and who’s not, trying to figure out if he’s truly entrenched in the NHL or if he’s bound for Rockford if and when the Blackhawks ever get fully healthy again.
He doesn’t have the time. Rookies are always trying to keep their heads above water in the fast-paced NHL, but the compressed Olympic-year schedule has only made it that much more hectic.
“It’s been a lot of games,” Lardis said with a weary smile. “I’m not used to this schedule. But it’s been a lot of fun. I came in at a weird time, a weird year, too, with the Olympic break. Crammed in a bunch of games. I’ve been asking some of the guys, ‘Is this the normal life?’”
“Normal” can mean a lot of things. There’s nothing normal about flying on personal jets and staying in Ritz-Carltons and having free food available just about everywhere you go. But no, even by the bizarre standards of life as a professional athlete, there’s been very little normal about this season. Still, it is starting to feel, in Lardis’ words, “real.” He catches himself from time to time a little slack-jawed and awestruck walking into a five-star hotel every now and then, but he’s starting to feel like a real NHLer. A full-time NHLer.
He’s playing like one, too. Lardis scored his fifth goal of the season in just his 19th game in Thursday night’s rollicking 4-3 shootout victory over the Carolina Hurricanes. He and fellow rookie Oliver Moore (a fight, an assist and the shootout winner) continued to show terrific chemistry, with Moore starting the play that led to Lardis’ goal (with a little help from new linemate Ryan Donato). Lardis also made several other heads-up plays throughout the night — including a diving one-handed stab to break up a Carolina D-to-D pass and clear the zone. It was as gutty a win as the Blackhawks have had all year, and their younger players were leading the charge.
“It can’t be just about scoring,” Lardis said. “It’s about playing a good team game and helping out any way you can.”
The Blackhawks have skewed young all season as the line between present and future continues to blur, but Thursday night was their youngest look yet. With Frank Nazar returning from his broken jaw, Teuvo Teräväinen still out with injury and Jason Dickinson a late scratch with an illness, the Blackhawks played seven forwards aged 23 or under and four defensemen aged 24 or younger, with 24-year-old Spencer Knight in goal.
There are highs and lows that come with that — Moore and Lardis hooking up for a goal was countered by an ill-advised Artyom Levshunov pinch (his partner, Wyatt Kaiser, already was deep in the offensive zone on the same side) that led to Connor Bedard gamely trying (but failing) to defend Jordan Staal on a Hurricanes two-on-one. Alex Vlasic and Ryan Greene logged major minutes on a penalty kill that went five-for-five to pass Colorado for No. 1 in the league at 85.1 percent.
Meanwhile, Moore admirably came to Lardis’ defense after a big Alexander Nikishin hit and asked for a fight. He got the fight — and was promptly fed three right hands to the face by the much larger Nikishin. Happy 21st birthday, young man.
“Obviously, I haven’t really worked on fighting — you could probably tell,” said Moore, sporting a big smile and a two-inch gash on his right cheek. “But I just wanted to stand in there for (Lardis). … (Nikishin’s) a big boy. And Russian. I actually talked to him a little bit; he said it was his first fight, too. Can’t buy that.”
Later, in overtime, Moore blew a tire that led to a great chance for Carolina. As he trailed the play, the puck skittered out to him and he had a breakaway of his own, but was denied by Frederik Andersen. In the sixth round of the shootout, though, he found redemption and a game-winner. A fight and the finisher.
“Just proud of him,” Blackhawks coach Jeff Blashill said. “That’s his teammate, that’s his buddy and he’s gonna stick up for him. You’ve got to do some things like that. He came out of it all right and I was really happy for him to be able to go out and end the game. It was fitting, I thought. To me, that’s karma. You stick up for your teammate and you get a chance to finish it and win the game, that’s karma.”
It was a gritty effort against one of the most intimidating teams in the league — the Hurricanes play fast, and they forecheck with almost reckless abandon. The young Blackhawks were badly outshot and out-chanced, but held their own and beat back a perennial Stanley Cup contender. This is the way the Blackhawks are headed, and they could get even younger after the trade deadline, with Connor Murphy, Dickinson and Ilya Mikheyev (who scored a short-handed goal in the first period with a beautiful one-man effort) all potential trade chips, and first-round picks Anton Frondell and Sacha Boisvert possibly on the way this spring.
But what about in the short term?
Veteran Sam Lafferty was the Blackhawks’ only healthy scratch in Raleigh, but Teräväinen should be back relatively soon, as will Dickinson. Those guys won’t be sitting. Chicago is only carrying six defensemen as it is to make room for all these forwards, and at some point, someone might be the odd man out. Logically, it would be a younger player such as Landon Slaggert, Colton Dach or, yes, even Lardis.
Lardis now has five goals and an assist in 19 games, but has looked dangerous on plenty of nights. He has more individual scoring chances per 60 than even Connor Bedard (Slaggert, in fact, leads the team in that category) and has been a regular presence on the power play. He should feel safe, but it’s always hard for any rookie to feel completely safe in the NHL.
Lardis, who scored 71 goals last season in the OHL and 13 goals in 24 AHL games earlier this season, is still learning to come to grips with the fact that just because he doesn’t score in a game doesn’t mean he played poorly. It’s something he and Moore have discussed as linemates in similar situations.
“Just making sure that we’re playing good defensively and doing the little details in our game, making sure we’re not turning the puck over in important times in the game, making sure we’re playing solid hockey, whether it’s in the offensive zone creating chances to the defensive zone, helping out,” Lardis said. “It’s the best league in the world, you’re not going to score every single night. You just have to make sure you can find ways to help your team out any way you can.”
Moore, meanwhile, is almost certainly done with the AHL. Since moving to center in the wake of the injuries to Bedard and Nazar, he has looked like a different player — more aggressive, more effective. It was easy to slot him on the third line with Donato and Lardis with Dickinson out, but even when Dickinson is back, Blashill has Moore penciled in at center. With Bedard, Nazar and Dickinson ahead of him, that likely means a demotion to the fourth line — even if it’s in name only.
With a jam-packed schedule and more road games without the last change ahead of them, Blashill is looking for a little more balance beyond Bedard’s line.
“I don’t know who’s the fourth line and who’s the second line, to be honest with you,” Blashill said. ”My goal is to create four lines that can play against anybody. … I want four lines that can go out so the minutes can be a little more equal than they were prior. That can be a positive for us.”
It can actually be pretty fun to watch a hockey game with other NHL players, to pick apart a play with your peers and try to predict what’ll happen next. Throughout this heavy home schedule in January, Nazar has been hanging back in the players’ lounge, watching the games with the other scratches and injured players. Whether it was Bedard or Lafferty or Teräväinen or whoever else, Nazar and his sidelined teammates would try to guess who was going to score next for the Blackhawks, or get into the weeds breaking down why a play went down the way it did.
Like any other fan, Nazar rode the highs of a four-game win streak and endured the lows of a three-game losing streak.
“That part was fun,” Nazar said. “I mean, it sucks just watching and seeing all the ups and downs. You want to be a part of it. But I was really happy to see a lot of our success to start the year, and the guys were playing really well.”
It’s been a long month for Nazar as he waited for his broken jaw to heal. For the first couple of weeks, he couldn’t chew solid foods. Every now and then, he’d cheat and just basically swallow food whole, but for the most part, it was a lot of soups and smoothies. Friends and family regularly had food delivered to his home, and Nick Foligno’s wife, Janelle — “Mrs. Foligno,” Nazar respectfully called her — even made him some chicken-noodle soup that they brought over to him. He lost seven or eight pounds, but has put some of it back on already.
Nazar returned wearing a football-style face shield and had four shots on goal in 18:30. He had a golden opportunity to give the Blackhawks the lead midway through the third period when he slipped behind the Carolina defense to take a deft pass from Tyler Bertuzzi, but he couldn’t bury it past Andersen from close range. Nazar also took a big Andrei Svechnikov hit in the third period, with some of the contact right in the face, but he bounced back up and didn’t miss any time.
Nazar is already a fixture in the lineup and has a long-term contract, but this is his first full NHL season, too. He didn’t want a month of midseason rest, but he could be better off for it.
“Anytime you get away and come back to the game, it’s always a good reset,” he said. “It’ll be a nice little stretch here and then we’ll have another break (for the Olympics), then be refreshed coming back into the game after (the) break again. It’s nice to have those two little spurts of time off.”
Levshunov wasn’t benched after his mistake led to the Staal goal, but Blashill scaled back his minutes significantly, with Louis Crevier playing a career-high 22:21,
“I didn’t think Arty had his best night, especially early,” Blashill said. “Ice time has to be earned. And there’s been nights where Arty’s played really good and he’s played a lot, and tonight wasn’t his night. And I thought Louis was going. … It’s just part of the growing process. Overall, he hasn’t been that type of roller coaster where it’s one good, one bad. I just think the last few games it’s kind of gone that way — it was bad, good, and then bad tonight. He’s just got to keep building his game.”:
If the Blackhawks wanted to, they could send their younger players down for the Olympic break to keep them playing. But they might need the rest more than anybody.
Blashill said it hasn’t been decided yet.
“Let’s see where everything’s at,” he said. “They’re going to (play) 82 games this year in a real right, condensed (schedule), so I don’t know that that’s the best thing, necessarily. That’s a debate we’ve had before. A lot of our guys have never played anything close to this schedule, like an NHL schedule. It’s not something that we’ve discussed yet.”