Yes, Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight successfully found a place to live in Chicago that’s nowhere near any CTA train tracks.
But yes, Knight’s friends at home in Connecticut — where he has spent most of the summer — also sufficiently ribbed him for his viral train quote from exit interviews in April: “I don’t know why they’re above ground and so loud all the time.”
“They’re always like, ‘Oh, not the trains!’ ” Knight said this week.
He’s sticking to his opinion, though.
“[My mom and I] were in the West Loop for dinner, and there were three trains going by and a guy on his motorcycle revving his engine,” Knight said. “I’m like, ‘I can’t live in this. I need to be either 50 stories up or in an area that doesn’t have this.’ ”
With his housing situation sorted out, Knight, 24, has been able to focus on preparing for the upcoming season. He instantly has become one of the Hawks’ cornerstones, and his performance will have a big effect on how much the team improves.
“Once [I got] over the initial shock of being traded, I was ecstatic to have landed in Chicago,” said Knight, who arrived from the Panthers in March in exchange for Seth Jones and a 2026 first-round pick. “Everyone who asks how it is, I tell them, ‘I love it. It just feels like hockey.’ You can feel the energy in the building, in the city.
“What I’m really excited for this year is for us to . . . become better hockey players and become a better team. Us playing together for another year is just going to drive everyone closer as friends and teammates. We’re going to battle each other. I’ve got everyone else on the team’s back, I know they have mine, and we’re going to drive this in the right direction and get to a point where [we can say], ‘OK, we’re in this.’
“Once you see this team take off, things turn around fast. You saw that with Montreal last year.”
Crucial ingredient
Before the Jones-for-Knight trade, goalie was probably the weakest position in the Hawks’ prospect pool.
Drew Commesso is an intriguing piece, and his late-season surge in Rockford increased his stock after Knight’s arrival, but he’s not an elite prospect. Arvid Soderblom improved significantly last season and now has 86 games of NHL experience, but he’ll probably never be more than a backup.
In Knight, the Hawks have a potential long-term franchise goalie. But now it’s up to him — with the help of Hawks goalie coach Jimmy Waite and longtime Connecticut-based trainers Ben Prentiss and Brian Elser — to reach that potential.
In his first 95 NHL games, he has been a roughly middle-of-the-pack goalie. His career save percentage is .904; the league average was .900 last season. His career GSAA (goals saved above average) is plus-0.8.
His save percentage and GSAA dipped to .893 and minus-2.9, respectively, with the Hawks last season, but that was over a small 15-game sample.
Talent-wise, however, he’s well ahead of the pack. He’s one of the most technically precise goalies to enter the league in some time, with outstanding technique, particularly his lower-body technique.
“What impresses me is his explosiveness to move side-to-side — and, after a save, how quick he is to react to a second shot,” Waite said in March. “He gets really low and wide, and his edges are really good at pushing left and right. He’s able to make saves that other guys don’t make because of how quick he is.”
OH MY GOODNESS, SPENCER KNIGHT 🤯 pic.twitter.com/JybtLkW1di
— Blackhawks on CHSN (@CHSN_Blackhawks) April 13, 2025
Knight’s observant and thoughtful mindset, in addition to the unique experience he gained watching Sergei Bobrovsky lead the Panthers to the Stanley Cup in 2024, add more tools to his box. He has a lot going for him.
The challenge will be putting it all together. Whether he does or doesn’t will determine whether he follows a career trajectory like that of Jacob Markstrom or like Ilya Samsonov. Those goalies’ save percentages also were .904 after their first 95 games, but they’ve diverged greatly since.
Knight putting it all together — or at least most of it together — this season might also be the Hawks’ most viable path to stepping out of the NHL basement and reaching the fringe of the playoff picture.
He isn’t quite Connor Bedard, but he’s arguably the Hawks’ biggest X-factor.
Stance change
Most NHL players take one lengthy break immediately after their season ends, then gradually ramp up training in the summer. Knight prefers to take multiple short breaks.
“I like to continuously stay in shape,” he said. “Then, toward the end of the summer, when I feel like I need a break, I take another one instead of taking a full break at the beginning of the summer and then playing catch-up.”
That meant he continued skating for a few weeks after the Hawks’ season finale April 15. It wasn’t warm yet, so it didn’t feel like time for a vacation. The lessons he learned during his initial six-week stint were also still fresh in his mind.
One of those lessons was that he needed to improve his glove use after getting beat on that side often during the final weeks of the season. He has tweaked his goaltending posture this offseason to be slightly more forward and upright.
“There’s times where you skate around and end up with your hips back a little bit, and then you go down and it’s almost like you’re sitting back while in your butterfly,” he explained. “So [I changed to] more forward hips, which increases the height of your upper body. That way, your hands are presenting more forward.”
He has also worked on making more “desperation saves” in his usual butterfly stance — just moving laterally in that stance — instead of sprawling out on the ice.
Conditioning has been an area of emphasis, too, since he knows he’ll have a much larger workload this season than he ever did as Bobrovsky’s backup in Florida.
He enjoyed how frequently he played this spring, starting 15 of the final 22 games, but he knows it’ll take stamina to do that over 82.
“When you play once every week and a half or so . . . you’re preparing yourself a few days in advance and then recovering for a few days after,” Knight said. “Whereas when you’re playing every other day, you’re not looking past that next day. And I really
enjoyed that. It kept me in the zone, kept me in the present.
“My body felt great. My mind felt great. Everything felt natural. But [now I’m] . . . getting myself ready to handle that workload this coming season and into the future.”