Perhaps the Blackhawks thought they could come into Joe Louis Arena and steal the opening game of the Stanley Cup Western Conference finals. Instead they found themselves bound and gagged before stealing out of town down a game to the Detroit Red Wings after a 2-1 overtime loss Thursday night.
The Hawks will regroup in Chicago before returning to Detroit for Game 2 Sunday afternoon.
It was the Hawks’ third straight overtime game and fourth in the last five. They had won the last three, but this one was over almost before it began. It took the Red Wings just 61 seconds to break a 1-1 deadlock on Nicklas Lidstrom’s 55-foot slap shot from just inside the blue line that goalie Ed Belfour said he never saw until “after it was in the net.”
Belfour was screened on the shot after Detroit’s Keith Primeau won a faceoff from Jeremy Roenick.
“We lost the faceoff clean,” said Hawks coach Darryl Sutter, who quite clearly had something more to say to Roenick on the subject. “I’m not sure Eddie saw it.”
“Belfour had no chance at all,” insisted Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman.
Neither, in truth, did the Hawks, even if they did manage to go 60 minutes still tied with a team that had torn through its first two playoff series in nine games.
“I don’t know that we played well enough that there should have been an overtime,” Sutter said. “Obviously, we didn’t do a good job of penetrating their defense.”
Just as obviously, somebody didn’t do a good job of communicating after the loss. Roenick and Tony Amonte insisted that their coach had issued a gag order.
“Darryl said I can’t talk unless you clear it with him,” said Amonte. Roenick brushed past reporters with more or less the same message. But Sutter retorted: “They can talk all they want. They’ve been talking for three days, but everything they said, they didn’t do.”
What the Hawks didn’t do was generate any offense at all after Joe Murphy’s first-period power-play goal gave them a 1-0 lead. In the last two periods and the brief overtime, they leveled exactly five shots at Mike Vernon.
“We know we were lucky to be in this overtime,” said Chris Chelios, who had potted the game-winners in the Hawks’ two overtime victories in Vancouver. “Eddie kept us in it. We got a power-play goal and after that I don’t know how many chances we had. Not many.”
“We were just on our heels, even in the first period,” said Murray Craven. “We certainly didn’t create much offense. When it’s that one-sided, obviously it’s not all what they were doing. They did come after us, but we’re a better hockey team than that. We certainly can’t play that much in our own end. It will be the end of us if we do.”
Most of the second period was played in the Hawks’ end and it took the Wings less than three minutes to get the tying goal. It was scored by Primeau after Belfour had made a tremendous save on Ray Sheppard’s rebound through a screen.
Primeau got Sheppard’s rebound and shot it wide and high off the glass, but Hawks defenseman Eric Weinrich, in battling Sheppard on the boards, flicked it right back within Primeau’s reach. “I don’t know what happened after that,” said Weinrich.
What happened was the big center swatted it one-handed behind Belfour’s back as he skated by.
“It seemed to be the kind of game where either team could have sat on a lead because both teams have a lot of players who know how to play on the lead,” said Bowman.
Murphy’s goal came on a rebound of Roenick’s shot. It was the Hawks’ second power play and, as it turned out, their last. Roenick had skated in front of the net to flip a shot at Vernon and, “I just picked up the rebound and shot it at the net,” said Murphy. “It hit something and went in.”
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Weinrich noted that thereafter the Wings “were dumping the puck in and getting pretty good forechecking. That wears a team down after a while. That’s what we’ve got to do.”
Murphy insisted that despite the loss, “we feel we can beat them. But we’ve got to get in the trenches. We’ve got to muck it out. The little battles. We didn’t win the little battles.”
They didn’t win the big one, either.