Patrick Kane’s Success Can’t Stop Chicago Blackhawks Struggles
By Jim Lynch
Not including the 2020 bubble, Chicago Blackhawks have not made the playoffs since 2017. Despite the relatively strong play from star forward Patrick Kane, the Blackhawks have not been able to succeed.
I was looking through the scoring leaders from the past few years and something surprised me. Despite the Blackhawks’ poor seasons, Patrick Kane has continued to be near the top of the scoring race.
This past season Kane was 15th in the league in points with 92. He was one of three players in the top 15 to not make the playoffs. The other two were Winnipeg’s Kyle Connor and Vancouver’s J.T. Miller.
In 2020-21 the results get more frustrating. Kane was tied for fifth in the league in points with guys like Auston Matthews and Mikko Rantanen. That season Kane put up 66 points in 56 games. Of the players in the top 20, only three of them did not make the playoffs. One was Artemi Panarin of the New York Rangers, the other two were Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat.
Going back one more season to where the Blackhawks finished seventh in the Central Division we see similar results. Kane was eight in the league with 84 points in the 70 games before the COVID pause.
The Blackhawks have been getting star-level scoring from Patrick Kane the past few seasons, and yet they haven’t done much with it missing out on the playoffs every year since 2017.
In fact, the only real down year for Kane in which he did not put up more than a point per game in recent memory was the 2017-18 season when he only registered 76 points in 82 games. That also happened to be his first year without Artemi Panarin and the first year the Hawks missed the playoffs since winning their championships.
The Chicago Blackhawks are about to undergo a long rebuild that really has not started yet. While I would love to keep guys like Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat on the team during this rebuild, one has to wonder how much good that would do for their careers considering they are near the top of the league in points yet missing out on the playoffs every year.