Column: Slack effort by Chicago Blackhawks is coach Luke Richardson’s cue to get firm

It’s not often a team bag skates following a win.

Hope the Chicago Blackhawks rested up Sunday coming off their 5-4 comeback in overtime Saturday night in San Jose, because that rally didn’t spare them from hoofing it up and down the ice at Fifth Third Arena on Monday afternoon.

Winning may be the bottom line, but coach Luke Richardson read the fine print: The Hawks found themselves down four goals to the team with the worst record in the league.

And it was the third straight game an opponent scored four consecutive goals, one of them a shutout.

“Little bit to grab their attention,” Richardson said of Monday’s bag skate — typically a demanding endurance workout without pucks. “I know we skipped out of the (Sharks) game luckily on top, and that’s great on them that they were able to do that, but if we go back two games, we weren’t happy with our performance in two games. That’s just not professional enough for me. You have to do it every day.

“So we worked in practice today.”

"I think society’s different. … One sentence is going to mean 20 different things to 20 different people.

“(But) I was pretty clear — I think they all got the same message.”

—Luke Richardson on using old-school communication with new-school players pic.twitter.com/Hf8JZinXjp

— Phillip Thompson (@_phil_thompson) March 25, 2024

Lukas Reichel, whose recent play has been winning over coaches after a stint in Rockford, certainly wasn’t complaining.

“Today we skated a lot and had a hard practice, and then tomorrow in the morning it’s like no skate (an optional),” he said. “It’s good to go on the ice and practice hard and then the next day you can rest.”

It would’ve been perfectly reasonable to schedule a mandatory morning skate, but Richardson doesn’t believe in overkill.

He was hired partly because he’s Mr. Calm, Mr. Reserve.

But surely even Mister Rogers has had to tell off a neighbor or two.

For Richardson, one of those moments came during the first period of Saturday’s game, when he gave his players a “pretty clear” message he wasn’t pleased.

“I didn’t wait until after the first period. I waited for a (TV) timeout and then I called them in close because I didn’t want to waste (calling) a timeout that early in the game. … (But) I didn’t really want to wait until the end of the first because it could trickle and get worse.”

It did get worse before it got better. Two Sharks goals in the first and two in the second.

“When we feel like we’ve done our job and prepared them, and we’re doing the exact opposite of what our pregame message was … that’s unprofessional and it’s unacceptable,” Richardson said.

“I let them know that in the best way or fashion of urgency that I thought was needed at the time. Then I tried to back off and say not too much at all.”

Again: Avoid overkill.

Too much of your voice becomes white noise.

“I thought, why would I double up on the message and sound contradictory or repetitive?” he said. Let some of the veteran players and assistant coaches handle some of the barking.

“It took a little while … (but) when (Ryan) Donato scored that goal (in the second period) … we started playing faster. And once we got that goal, our bench really lit up.”

The bounce back was great, but how does a rebuilding team — only asked to try to be competitive — look so deflated in the first place?

Last week’s road trip isn’t the first time the Hawks have slipped into lethargy.

Earlier this month, Jason Dickinson pondered that conundrum.

His take was sometimes it’s hard to keep inexperienced players engaged in all facets of the game when things aren’t going well.

“It’s harder to get all 18 guys feeling good on a given night and connected on a given night,” he told the Tribune days after the Hawks broke a seven-game winless streak with a 5-2 victory over the Arizona Coyotes. “You’ll get 10 guys, you’ll get 12, maybe you’ll even get 14, 15, 16 — you’ll get almost all of them.

“But a more veteran group, they know how to make themselves effective even when they’re not doing what they’re typically asked to do. A young group, it’s hard to find that. There are young guys that think, ‘I’ve got to do this every single night,’ and we need them to, but there’s also little things that they can do inside their game that can impact the game outside of just scoring goals, blocking shots, fighting, hitting, whatever it is.

“There are other ways to impact the game.”

On Monday, Richardson struggled to pinpoint why his young team seems to have gotten a bad case of senioritis, other than echoing Dickinson’s thinking that on good teams, veterans find a way to get everybody in line.

“It happens to everybody, but good teams don’t let it happen as often or at all,” he said. “You have driven guys who drive it all the time, and they’re going to carry people with them: ‘Oh, it’s not my night.’ ‘Too bad. You’re coming.’

“That’s what we want here. We want that culture here. We have guys like that and we need more of them.”

Good teams “have driven guys who drive it all the time, and they’re going to carry people with them. ‘Oh, it’s not my night.’ ‘Too bad, you’re coming.’”

—Blackhawks coach Luke Richardson pic.twitter.com/j6HTef6sXw

— Phillip Thompson (@_phil_thompson) March 25, 2024