Blackhawks allow too many odd-man rushes in loss to Kings

The Blackhawks allowed several odd-man rushes during the first few minutes of the second period Sunday against the Kings.

It wasn’t for a long time, but it was for long enough to seal their fate in a 3-1 loss that ended their five-game point streak.

The Hawks also allowed too many odd-man rushes in their victory Thursday against the Lightning, but head coach Jeff Blashill couldn’t identify any systemic reasons why the pattern repeated Sunday.

Instead, the rushes stemmed from individual mistakes. The worst was a turnover by defenseman Sam Rinzel high in the offensive zone that led to Kings forward Alex Laferriere’s tying goal on a two-on-one rush in the other direction.

Just more than a minute later, forward Kevin Fiala gave the Kings the lead on a breakaway-turned-wraparound goal. Forward Jason Dickinson, returning from injury for the Hawks, took the blame for the offensive-zone turnover that preceded it.

‘‘It’s completely self-inflicted,’’ Dickinson said. ‘‘It’s just stupid plays that could be easily corrected [if we] just show a little poise and not panic in those moments when the momentum does swing.’’

Said Blashill: ‘‘You can’t try to make something out of nothing in terms of your puck management. I think we stopped taking what was given.’’

It was otherwise a tight-checking, uneventful game, which is exactly the way the Kings wanted it to be. An unfiltered Connor Bedard, who scored the Hawks’ lone goal early on, described the Kings as ‘‘boring’’ afterward.

‘‘It’s not like a dig or anything,’’ Bedard said. ‘‘They sit back a lot and make it hard to get zone entries. We’re putting it in and trying to go get it, but they’re good at breaking it out. A lot of teams are going to play like that, especially when they have a lead, so we have to figure out how to crack that. That was a good experience for us.’’

Powerless play

Bedard also called the Hawks’ power play ‘‘terrible,’’ and he wasn’t wrong about that, either.

The power play generated only four shots on goal in five fruitless opportunities. The Hawks are 1-for-13 in their last three games with the man advantage and have fallen into a tie for 23rd in the league. Their underlying metrics are awful, too.

‘‘We made a couple of tweaks on our breakouts that didn’t pay off the way we were hoping [they would],’’ Blashill said.

‘Stats we trust’

Blashill doesn’t necessarily give off the vibe of an analytics nerd, but that was actually one of his specialties during his three seasons on the Lightning’s staff. He said his ‘‘analytical-type mind’’ draws him to them.

Some of his recent comments have revealed he pays close attention to the Hawks’ internally calculated metrics of assessing player performance, too, even though he’s careful not to trust them blindly.

‘‘You write algorithms that measure things you think are important,’’ Blashill said last week. ‘‘The quick look at it — and, honestly, I think this happens in the media — is you get a stat, you take it and you use it to build your argument. But that doesn’t mean that stat measures what it’s supposed to measure or that it’s accurate.

‘‘We’ve just tried over the years to find stats we trust. Ultimately, if you get great stats that you trust, that measure what they’re supposed to measure . . . then it takes away the emotion of the wins and losses and becomes basically factual. It can make you take a second look at some things and look at it from a different perspective, which is important.’’