Blackhawks Win, Kane Out “a little bit.”

Added on Dec 06, 2010 by J Merrill in

NHL

The Hawks manage to beat the Flames, but it came at a big price. Instead of celebrating picking up a big win, The Chicago Blackhawks had to worry about another injury. Kane went down awkwardly while trying to avoid a hit by Cory Sarich, will likely be out for “a little bit,” according to Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville.

Quenneville said after the game, “We’ll know more (on Monday) exactly where we’re at with him, ‘a bit.’ It’s tough to speculate. We don’t want to go into it right now, but it’s not real serious. We’ll go to that extent. Injuries are always something you have to deal with. It’s never going to be a perfect season health-wise. You get tested. You get challenged organizationally. You find out about some people and it’ll be something we’ll be finding out without Kaner for a bit here.” Kane is Chicago’s second-leading scorer with 27 points (11 goals), but now will likely join fellow injured forwards Marian Hossa (lower body) and Fernando Pisani (upper body).

The game itself was a strange one, with all of the goals coming in the first period with the exception of the Dave Bolland’s empty netter for the Hawks. Bolland also had one in the first period that put the Hawks up 2-0, and broke a 17-game scoreless drought. The teams also combined for a whopping 21 penalties and 17 power plays, Chicago finishing 4-of-9 and Calgary 2-of-8.

Blackhawks rookie goalie Corey Crawford again came up big after allowing the two early goals. He made 24 saves against the Flames. Crawford (7-4-0) now has a personal six-game winning streak, said “That’s good, I’m not going to argue with that, but the big thing is we’ve just got to keep working here and keep giving our best effort and doing the little things right. In the end, that paid off tonight … the little things.”

The little things played a role for Flames coach Brent Sutter as well. “We were just standing and weren’t generating anything,” Sutter said. “When you stand still, you give teams opportunities to get into shooting lanes and block some shots. We just didn’t generate enough. Five-on-five we were fine, Your goaltender needs to be your best penalty killer and he wasn’t that. In the third period, you have six minutes of power-plays in the last eight minutes of the game and you don’t generate enough.” After scoring twice on the power play early, the flames went 0-6, and four of those were in the las ten minutes of the third. They have also dropped nine of the last ten games against the Hawks.

After the game Jonathon Toews said he wasn’t impressed with the win himself. He said, “We’ll take an ugly win like that once in awhile, If we have to do that in the future without Kaner, it is what it is. We found a way without some of our top players like (Brian Campbell) and (Hossa), and I guess now we don’t have a choice. We’re going to have to do it without Kaner.”

The Chicago Blackhawks (15-12-2, 32pts) head back to the ice against the Dallas Stars (16-8-1, 33pts) on Wednesday, and the Calgary Flames (11-14-2, 24pts) face the Tampa Bay Lightening (15-9-3, 33pts) on Tuesday.