5 takeaways from the Chicago Blackhawks’ 5-2 season-opening loss, including a worrisome penalty kill and a banner night for Jack Johnson

Notice: Trying to get property 'post_title' of non-object in /home/ofzfvenynm4q/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-rss-feed-to-post/includes/wprss-ftp-display.php on line 109

DENVER — Before raising their third championship banner Wednesday, the Colorado Avalanche trotted out Blink-182 co-founder Mark Hoppus who led the Ball Arena crowd in a singalong of “All The Small Things” as Stanley Cup highlights played on the video board.

It’s no “Chelsea Dagger,” but it’ll do.

The Avs’ anthem is emblematic of all the small things that separate a Cup-caliber team and a forebear fallen on hard times like the Chicago Blackhawks.

An errant pass here, a bad stick there, a few forgotten assignments everywhere. Add it all up and you get a 5-2 Hawks loss in the season opener.

And if it wasn’t for a sixth penalty that resulted in Colorado’s fourth power-play goal with three minutes left in the game, the Hawks would’ve matched the same score — 4-2 — to the same opponent in the same venue, only a day apart on the calendar.

But a 5-2 loss felt far less like a calamity then last year’s 4-2 defeat?

On Wednesday night, as soon as the festivities were over and the puck dropped, the Avs simply hounded Hawks’ puck carriers and launched 12 shots on goal on goalie Petr Mrázek in the first period alone.

The Hawks weathered the swarm, only giving up one five-on-five goal — Andrew Cogliano’s opening score with 6 minutes left in the first period.

“The first and the third, we were really good,” said Luke Richardson, who made his NHL head coaching debut. “The second, we felt the heat and our focus got lost a little bit.”

Jonathan Toews agreed the Hawks did a “pretty good job of staying out of trouble” in the first period before things went off the rails.

“There’s just situations where we get stuck out there too long or we don’t manage the puck — these (are) little things that I think are easy to work on and adjust,” he said.

All the small things.

Here are five takeaways from the game.

It’s admittedly an overreach. It’s just one game, so that doesn’t even qualify as a small sample size. But it’s not a stretch to say the Hawks’ penalty kill looked much better in the preseason, and the 1-for-26 power play was the source of concern.

Richardson wants a penalty kill that keeps structure but goes after the puck carrier — he’d rather attack than sit back in a defensive position waiting for a talented power play unit like the Avs’ (they ranked seventh last season at 24%) to eventually find a way to pick them apart.

And on the first kill, it worked. But on the second, the Hawks doubled Nathan MacKinnon on the left, and some precision passes over the right circle later, Mikko Rantanen threaded a pass through Jarred Tinordi’s legs to Valeri Nichushkin for the tip-in.

After that, the Hawks seemed ever more tentative with each power-play goal, settling into a box formation.

-On the first of Artturi Lehkonen’s two powerplay goals, the Hawks hardly challenged the carrier as MacKinnon, Rantanen and Lehkonen went high-low-high and the Hawks’ sticks came too late.

When the dust settled, the Hawks’ penalty kill had forked over four goals.

[ [Don’t miss] 9 Chicago Blackhawks storylines to watch this season, including who plays with Patrick Kane and how to fix the power play ]

Ironically, Richardson was asked before the game whether the Avs would be a big test for the revamped PK.

“Yeah, hopefully not,” he said with a sheepish laugh.

After the game, he blamed the Avs’ speed and the Hawks’ turnovers in the neutral zone.

“When you’re in the box against this team, it’s too long (and) bad things are going to happen,” Richardson said. “We had a good kill early, but you can’t keep doing that against this team.”

The Hawks could’ve redecorated the penalty box with as much time as they spent in there. And it was mostly stick penalties: slashing, hooking and tripping.

Max Domi said, “They’ve got some high-end talent there when you look at MacKinnon and Makar. When they get going, if you get back on your heels a little bit, all it takes is one little wrong move and you’re taking a penalty.”

Toews agreed — and added the Hawks need to have better sticks and clears — but he also alluded to some soft calls.

“There’s a couple situations where we’re a step behind and we’ve got to put a stick on a guy or maybe cheat a little bit to survive and not get scored on or give up a Grade A,” he said. “There’s a couple situations where it’s calls that you don’t necessarily agree with either.

“Sometimes there’s a stick on (the) puck where the guy trips over our stick when we’ve got our stick on the puck. Little things like that.”

[ [Don’t miss] How the top 11 Chicago Blackhawks prospects fared at training camp, from Nolan Allan to Samuel Savoie ]

On a positive note, the power play was a confidence booster for some.

Toews scored the Hawks’ first goal of the 2022-23 season, passing to Phillpp Kurashev as he put Andrew Cogliano on his back and then got the puck back for a kneeling rip into a wide-open net.

Andreas Athanasiou assisted on the play.

“You look at the patient with Double A to go up to Kurshy there, and then that’s an all-world pass,” Domi said.

Domi’s goal on the second power play arguably was even prettier.

Patrick Kane dished off to Tyler Johnson as he slipped behind him coming up the left wall, then Johnson zipped a backdoor pass to Domi, who charged the net and knocked the puck in off the post for his first goal as a Hawk.

“That’s a heck of a play by Johnny there,” Domi said. “I really just went to the back post and had my stick there. I didn’t do much. That’s a great pass by him and something we can build on.”

Toews’ distinction as the Hawks’ first scorer of the season is ironic. It felt like he was the last Hawk to get in the goal column — 26 games into 2021-22.

Reminded of that, Toews laughed a little.

“Yeah, I mean, let’s not go there right now,” he said. “But having said that, it feels good to get on the board and get some confidence, and I think in this situation, in this game, you just want to go out there and make plays.”

It’s the third time in Toews’ career he’s scored in an opener, according to the Hawks, the last occurring on Oct. 4, 2018, at Ottawa.

All through camp and the preseason, Richardson has resisted making a big deal about his NHL coaching debut after he was hired in June as the franchise’s 40th coach.

Richardson softened just a bit once his first game was in the books.

“It feels the same,” he said. “There was definitely a lot of excitement in the building tonight, and we responded pretty good in the first period to that. As a coach, I was happy with that.”

As for the job itself: “I just fall into the same routine. I try to have some communication with the referees and keep our guys engaged and try to correct a little bit along the way as we go.”

Johnson admitted “it’s definitely going to be emotional, it’s going to be weird.”

Weird, all right.

This time last year, in another season opener, the defenseman was sharing the ice with Avalanche and Hawks, only he was wearing burgundy and blue. And he scored the opening goal in the Avs’ 4-2 win.

Johnson and the Avs went on to win the Stanley Cup, and as fate would have it, he signed with the Hawks, ensuring he’d be in Denver to celebrate the championship with his old teammates.

He attended the ring ceremony Monday.

Before Wednesday’s game, the Avs paid tribute to him with a video and had him on the ice for a “team” picture. Johnson stood with his former teammates as they watched the Stanley Cup banner be lifted into the rafters.

“It was a little spontaneous,” Johnson said of the arrangement. “But it’s a special thing to be a part of.”

He also thanked the Hawks.

“Tazer (Jonathan Toews) even offered to have the whole team going on the bench and be there to support me but told him, ‘You guys get ready for the game,’” Johnson said.

He said he felt “incredibly proud” during the banner raising.

“I got pretty emotional actually when they were doing the video beforehand,” he said. “Someday I can bring my grandkids or my kids if they don’t believe Dad played and show them.”

Don’t get too caught up in the two power-play goals, as the Hawks didn’t score in five-on-five play. They were outshot 35-17 for the game, though defending through six penalty kills tends to put a damper on offensive opportunities.

Only Toews had more than two shots on goal (he had three).

Kane said before the game that he told linemates Domi and Athanasiou — and by extension, defensive “linemate” Seth Jones — not to defer to him.

“It’s tough because you don’t want to tell them too much, right?” Kane told the Tribune before the game. “You don’t want to get into their head too much where they’re just thinking about things.

“I actually told them right away at camp, let’s be selfish, let’s shoot. It seemed like we were passing up some shots and then you try to make the play, it doesn’t work out and then all of a sudden it gets magnified a little bit more.”

[ [Don’t miss] Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane are reunited on the same Chicago Blackhawks line: ‘We’ll be like a grumpy old couple’ ]

Kane said once they start taking pucks to the net, other chances should start opening up. But here wasn’t much open in the opener, and not a lot of shots.

Athanasiou took two even-strength shots, Domi took only one shot on the power play, in which he scored, and Jones took no shots at all (though he was busy racking up an eye-popping eight hits, a career high).

Kane said before the game he wasn’t worried he may be mismatched with a couple of lefty shooters, and that as a result his line will struggle to produce.

Of Athanasiou, Kane said: “Such a good skater, he’s so fast. It’s not really concerning to me what hand he is because he can get himself in different positions than other players can. Same with Domi, he’s got some great speed up the middle and (can) push the D back, create space. So there’s a lot to like about that line.”

[ [Don’t miss] Chicago Blackhawks send top prospect Lukas Reichel back to Rockford: ‘Why not go be the best center down there?’ ]

As important as Kane’s line will be, it’s obviously a group effort.

The Hawks made a push in the third period, regaining their bearings after a shaky second. They had a game-high seven shots on goal and four of them were high-danger, according to naturalstattrick.com.

“There were moments where it was there,” Toews said. “The big thing that stands out to me is when we want the puck, and we’re not afraid to go into traffic and support the puck-carrier, and we know where our next play’s going to be, it makes the game a lot easier for the other four guys.”

Before the game, Johnson wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his championship ring. His has a somewhat unique position in sports: He’s able to attend some of the championship celebrations, but as the opposition.

And with the Hawks on a weeklong road trip, what’s a player to do with a big gaudy (and very valuable) ring in a big box?

“You can’t exactly slide that in your suitcase,” he said.

Johnson called the ring — which features 220 diamonds totaling 22 carats on the top and 36 rubies on the stripes — “a showstopper, for sure.”

With the Hawks jetting off to Las Vegas next for Thursday night’s game against the Golden Knights, a certain someone suggested to Diamond Jack that he walk The Strip, flashing his ring like every other out-of-town high roller.

He laughed, “Yeah, no.”

Johnson certainly struck that image after the game, donning a suit and a sparkly knot that could choke a horse on his right hand.

“Yeah, it’s banner night. I don’t know when else you’re gonna wear it to a game?” he said.