Only two NHL teams have spent fewer than 300 minutes trailing this season: the Blackhawks and the Avalanche.
The latter team won again Wednesday to improve to a league-leading 16-1-5 this season. The former lost again Wednesday — their fourth straight defeat — to fall to a mediocre 10-8-5.
No stat could better demonstrate how costly the Hawks’ lead-protection issues have been this season, especially when combined with their 1-5 record in games that have gone to overtime.
Both those trends reared ugly heads again in the Hawks’ 4-3 overtime loss to the Wild, who are now a ridiculous 16-0-1 in the last 17 iterations of this rivalry, in front of a rowdy United Center crowd of 18,933.
The Hawks played some of their best hockey of the season for the first 39 minutes, building another 2-0 lead, only to let it slip away. They’ve now squandered 2-0 leads in three of their last four home games, although they did recover to win the first of those.
“Part of the learning process is to find a way to make sure there’s no way to lose that game,” coach Jeff Blashill said. “We played too good to lose it.”
All three Wild goals in regulation time originated from point shots through traffic. The first deflected off Tyler Bertuzzi’s skate and lofted over Spencer Knight; the second was tipped in by Wild forward Marco Sturm; the third initially skittered wide but created a scramble situation that Matt Boldy finished off.
All three Hawks goals were prettier — including a tic-tac-toe play from Bertuzzi to Sam Rinzel to Connor Bedard and a sweet move by Artyom Levshunov to finally record his first NHL goal — but they counted just the same.
Genuinely one of the prettiest plays the Blackhawks have executed in years:pic.twitter.com/uH2orWXJZV
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) November 27, 2025
“I’ll put that one on myself,” Bedard said. “I think I was on for every goal against. I lost Boldy there for the [equalizer]. That’s just something we’re all going to get better at.”
Said Blashill: “Tonight, we lacked a little bit of poise with the puck in the third [period]. You have to skate yourself out of pressure and make tape-to-tape passes, and because of that, I thought we were a little bit on our heels.”
In overtime, another critical and questionable call went against the Hawks — this time interference on Ilya Mikheyev — and Kirill Kaprizov sniped the game-winning power-play goal.
Bedard asserted the Hawks are “not going to blame the refs,” but Blashill called it definitely “not interference.”
The Hawks poured in 20 shots in the first period — their most since 2018 — and the final shot differential of 37-24 marked by far their best showing in that category this season. However, having now lost four straight, their better-than-expected start to the season is in jeopardy.