By Mark Lazerus (The Athletic)
ELMONT, N.Y. — There was no florid, flowery speech about banding together and salvaging a season. No slow-simmering narrative that gradually but dramatically rose to a boil of passion and cheers. Not even a slow-clap moment. This wasn’t a Disney movie. Anders Sorensen is not a Disney coach.
“I’m a pretty simple man,” he said on Wednesday. “I’m pretty black and white.”
And, well, that was just fine, because the Blackhawks didn’t need rhetoric during that first full meeting with their new interim head coach. Didn’t need dramatics and histrionics. All they needed to hear were solutions — solutions to their dormant offense, their porous defense, their inability to hold leads, their inability to rally late, their inability to string together any wins at all.
And while Sorensen didn’t have poetry, he did have solutions. He walked into that room and got right to the Xs and Os. He said the Blackhawks were going to go on the offensive. The forwards were going to forecheck with a purpose, the defensemen were going to join the rush. The Blackhawks were going to seek transition out of their own end rather than fear transition toward their own end. There’d be quick exits through orderly slot protection, more organized breakouts, cleaner play through the neutral zone. The Blackhawks were going to be more dynamic. More fun. More successful.
That’s it. That’s all he really had to say. That’s how a 49-year-old coach who never got higher than the ECHL as a player and never got higher than the AHL as a coach — a guy who had never participated in an NHL game in any way, who attended the last Winter Classic at Wrigley Field as a fan — wins over a room full of grizzled NHL veterans. By offering them hope. By offering them a way out of last place.
The Blackhawks, to a man, have blamed themselves for getting Luke Richardson fired. But they also were more than ready for a new voice — no matter how inexperienced that voice was.
“He doesn’t have to win us over,” Taylor Hall said. “We’re all in this together, right? We need to support him as much as he’s supporting us. And not to pile on the previous coach, but I think there were some adjustments that needed to be made — and that are being made — that are really going to help us play well. I’m looking forward to the future. We have a way better team than we’ve shown and I really feel like you’re going to start to see that now, game by game. It’s not going to be a 2-1 loss every night, a 3-2 loss. You’re going to see us put up three, four, five goals on a lot of nights when we start getting a handle on everything and everyone gets in sync.”
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