Instant Reaction: Chicago Blackhawks fall to Lightning 5-1

The Chicago Blackhawks fell to the Tampa Bay Lightning to start their season, and honestly, it was expected.

The Tampa Bay Lightning are a great team. It was just four months ago that we were watching the Lightning tear through the NHL Playoffs to take home the Stanley Cup. For the Chicago Blackhawks, a win was unlikely tonight.

The hope that the Lightning would get caught up in the moment during a banner-raising ceremony instantly went away when Chicago failed to capitalize on a great start to the game. Chicago had the first few scoring chances in this one, and they failed to take advantage.

Tampa Bay is everything the Blackhawks want to be one day. They have speed, skill, and defensive stars leading their team. Andre Vasilevskiy was a rock in net for the Lightning during the very few times that they needed a stop.

The ‘Hawks were drastically outplayed during their first game of the season, but the great thing is now they can only get better. Hopefully, we will see some changes moving forward for the team.

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Dominik Kubalik had less ice time tonight than Ryan Carpenter, Mattias Janmark, and Brandon Pirri to name a few. The team needs to put some offensive threats on the ice in order to win, and Kubalik is one of those threats.

The first few games of the season might be filled with Chicago trying to figure out how to best use all of their players, and that is fine, but one thing the team needs to fix is their ice time distribution.

The ‘Hawks stars were just not there tonight. Patrick Kane was held off the board, and his four shots were not that great. The entire team needs to be better in the future; even though the Blackhawks snuck away with a lucky goal to end the game, this basically was a shut out in how it left fans feeling after the game.

The Blackhawks’ next game is against Tampa Bay on Friday. Luckily after that, they won’t have to play the Bolts for a while.