MONTREAL — Look, I don’t want to sit here and write yet another Dylan Strome story. Strome isn’t Patrick Kane or Jonathan Toews or Alex DeBrincat or Seth Jones or Marc-André Fleury, and he’s probably not worthy of the inordinate amount of ink and pixels spilled into his name. Precious few players are.
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Strome is a talented but underachieving guy with two goals and three assists this season. He’s a little one-dimensional, with world-class vision and All-Star hands but AHL feet. He’s never been, nor will he ever likely be, a complete 200-foot player. Approaching his 25th birthday, he probably is what he is at this point of his career.
But he’s not a 13th forward. He’s not an NHL/AHL tweener. He’s not some fringe guy. He’s an NHL player, often a good one. But he continues to be held to a different standard than many of his teammates. And it’s sort of baffling.
Strome, coming off two of his best games of the season, was a healthy scratch Thursday night in Montreal. Interim head coach Derek King wanted to get the recalled Philipp Kurashev into a top-six role, and it came at Strome’s expense.
Now, King has correctly pointed out that putting Strome in a checking-line role is pointless because that’s not his game. Strome himself has said as much. Strome’s limitation, if you can call it that, is that he’s a skilled player who needs to play with other skilled players to generate offense. He’s not going to single-handedly create something out of nothing with a couple of meat-and-potatoes guys on his line the way Kane can with his otherworldly skill, or the way Brandon Hagel can with his unrelenting motor. So whenever King wants to put someone else on a scoring line, Strome takes the hit — not one of the many largely interchangeable grinders in the bottom six, and not one of the other scuffling forwards in the top six.
There’s a certain logic to it that makes sense in a vacuum. But the Blackhawks don’t operate in a vacuum. The Blackhawks are the worst five-on-five scoring team in the league. Some of the Blackhawks’ biggest scorers — Kane, Toews, Dominik Kubalik — aren’t scoring. The Blackhawks are bottom-heavy, with too many fourth-liners and not enough offensive-minded forwards. They need to score goals.
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And scratching Strome isn’t going to help them score goals.
King’s focus since taking over for Jeremy Colliton has been on grinding out 2-1 and 3-2 games. And a lot of his players are buying in, even repeating King’s mantra of “not getting bored” with playing safe, careful, low-event hockey. It’s worked, too, as the Blackhawks, following Thursday’s 2-0 win in Montreal, are a solid 9-5-0 since King took over. Players such as Reese Johnson and Riley Stillman have thrived under King. Johnson was statistically the worst player in the league — by a significant margin — under Colliton and is now a strong possession player who hasn’t been on the ice for a goal against since King took over. No other Blackhawks player can say that.
What King is going for is working. Can’t argue against that.
Is Strome — who’s at his best in a freewheeling, improvisational track meet — an ideal fit for that style? No, not at all. But neither is Kane. And if you’re going to win 2-1 or 3-2, you still have to score two or three goals. They gave up none against an inept Canadiens team on Thursday and it still felt like they barely won.
But here’s the really perplexing thing: Strome has been playing well lately. In all zones. He hasn’t become Marian Hossa overnight or anything, but in the four games since he returned to the lineup on Dec. 2, Strome led the Blackhawks in points per 60 with 2.65. He was fourth on the team with a 57.51 Corsi percentage. He was eighth with a 55.71 expected-goals-for percentage. The Blackhawks allowed only one goal in more than 45 minutes with him on the ice at five-on-five. In just three more minutes of five-on-five ice time over those four games, Toews was on the ice for three goals against. In just 10 more minutes, Hagel was on the ice for four goals against. In 24 more minutes, Kane was on the ice for five.
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Everyone watching could see it. The Blackhawks even tweeted a picture of a smiling Strome during the morning skate, posting, “It’s game day and Dylan Strome is very excited about it.” It was a perfectly fine and justifiable tweet of a relatively prominent and fan-favorite player who had been playing well. When King revealed an hour later that Strome was scratched, Strome was scratched from Twitter, too — the tweet was deleted and replaced with a picture of Hagel. Ouch.
King has been generally positive about Strome since taking over for Colliton, who had written off Strome entirely. He’s given Strome a real chance to succeed when Colliton wouldn’t. But King’s tenor changed Thursday. After a lengthy talk with Strome at center ice at the end of the morning skate — Strome skated away looking dejected — King didn’t hold back with reporters.
“We keep pounding it in him,” King said. “The big thing with him is he’s going to have to change his game a little bit to play. He understands that, and it’s a work in progress. It doesn’t happen overnight. He’s just got to keep picking away.”
When it was correctly pointed out that Strome had been playing better of late, King agreed — to a point. Strome had a goal Sunday on Long Island and an assist Tuesday against the Rangers and has been creating scoring chances with some regularity.
“Yeah, he’s been playing better,” King said. “You can’t base everything on points, right? It’s the trust factor. When we’re late in the game and I need to go to three lines, is he going to be that guy on one of those three lines that I can trust on a D-zone faceoff or when you’re trapped in your end? And right now, we’re just not trusting each other to that extent. He has a lot more to give, and he realizes that. Has he been playing better? For sure he has. But it’s those little details of the game.”
But Strome isn’t the one holding the Blackhawks back. Not recently, at least. His analytics are all good. He got on the scoresheet in two straight games. He was finally building some confidence, finally playing a more complete game — he had a couple of hustle plays in the defensive end against the Rangers on Tuesday, including a gritty third-effort clear after a teammate turned the puck over. And if anything, he was finally maybe raising his nonexistent trade value, which is no small thing considering how eager the Blackhawks seem to be rid of him.
Now, it’s back to square one. And it was a mistake from a coach who had been pushing all the right buttons.
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Put simply, scratching Strome makes the Blackhawks worse. Sure, it might be marginal — again, this isn’t a superstar or a savior we’re devoting all this space and attention to — but with the Blackhawks’ new style and the hole they’re trying to climb out of, marginal matters.
Five game observations
1. Heading into the game, Fleury’s looming 500th win felt something akin to Peter Bondra’s 500th goal or Chris Kunitz’s 1,000th game: technically Blackhawks milestones, but not really. But to do it in his home province, against the team he “adored” growing up, and to have the road crowd — which he laughingly said has always been pretty hostile toward him — chanting his name and giving him a standing ovation at the Bell Centre, well, that was something special.
Besides, there’s just something about Fleury that makes everybody in the hockey world smile. He came to Chicago billed as the best teammate ever, and he’s lived up to the hype.
“We were all putting a little pressure on ourselves to play for him in this game,” Toews said. “It’s just the kind of guy that he is; it didn’t take long to feel like he’s a big part of this team. He’s a special player and a special person. There are obviously a lot of reasons why he’s got such a great reputation, so we were pretty happy to be able to be on the ice with him for this win.”
Fleury made 30 saves to become the third goalie to reach the 500-win plateau, trailing just Martin Brodeur and Patrick Roy, under whose banner he played during the second period. And Fleury got to 500 in fewer games than either of those all-time legends. Montreal fans might have “booed and yelled a lot” at him throughout his career, as Fleury said, but they know hockey and they’re well acquainted with greatness.
“It meant a lot. It meant a lot to have so many people from Quebec being proud of me, being from here and achieving this goal,” Fleury said.
The Athletic’s Jeremy Rutherford caught up with Brodeur in St. Louis on Thursday night. The winningest goalie in NHL history and Montreal native was watching the end of the game on his tablet, hearing the crowd cheer for Fleury.
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“It’s quite a feat that he’s accomplished,” Brodeur said. “To do it in Montreal, for him being a French-Canadian kid — it’s a lot of wins, a lot of durability, and it’s pretty impressive. It’s a big number. There’s only two goalies and him; he’s the third one. It’s hard to be able to dominate for that long and to stay healthy enough to win 500 games. He’s been (in) backup roles, and he’s had to fight for the wins that he’s got. … He’s just a good person. I had a chance to play with him at Hockey Canada for the Olympics in 2010, so I got to know him really well there. I’m really excited for him and his family. Welcome to the club!”
2. Toews scored a goal in a regular-season hockey game. For the first time since maybe his first NHL goal, that was pretty darn newsworthy. Toews’ first goal of the season — and his first in more than 15 months, since the Edmonton bubble — came in his 26th game since returning from a season-long absence. When he got to the bench after redirecting a Seth Jones shot/pass past Jake Allen for the power-play tally, Toews smiled and shook his shoulders a few times as if a giant weight had been lifted.
“Like three or four guys pulling the monkey off for me,” Toews said, laughing. “Felt good. Weird to have the whole team probably want to jump on the ice and celebrate with you. Probably not a good sign.”
3. King drastically shuffled the lines, putting Henrik Borgström on the top line between DeBrincat and Kane (he scored the second goal) and Reese Johnson on the second line. The result was one of the better defensive efforts of the season — Montreal had just two high-danger scoring chances at five-on-five in the first two periods — but the offense looked anemic as ever.
“I’ll probably shake them up again for Toronto,” King said. “I’m not afraid to do that. But I thought our power play — put it back to the one at the start of the year — we had some good looks, and we’ll keep that going.”
4. In light of the Strome scratch and the flurry of moves between Rockford and Chicago lately, I asked King about the dynamic between him and interim general manager Kyle Davidson. Colliton and Stan Bowman were in constant communication and saw the game similarly. King and Davidson talk, too, but Davidson seems to respect King’s authority when it comes to knowing which players he needs and where.
“They throw stuff at me — just saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of this combo?'” King said. “But I have the final say. He allows me to do whatever I want (with the lines). (As for Rockford), I’ll say, ‘I need this kid’ or ‘What do we have down there?’ And I know pretty much what we have down there. I’m in communication with (IceHogs coach Anders Sorenson) a lot. And they have a lot of injuries, so up front, the one kid I needed was the only guy down there who can help us right now: Kurashev. With (Lukas) Reichel hurt and all these other guys hurt, it was a simple pick.”
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5. The Blackhawks acquired another veteran bottom-sixer Thursday, trading defenseman Chad Krys — a second-round pick in 2016 who hasn’t panned out — to Toronto for 28-year-old winger Kurtis Gabriel, who’s been splitting time between the NHL and AHL with the Wild, Devils, Sharks and Leafs over the past six seasons. Gabriel is known for his fighting, both on and off the ice. Read all about his fight for social justice in this story by The Athletic’s Joshua Kloke.
(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
