The Blackhawks lost both their best defensive forward and yet another game Wednesday at the United Center.
Jason Dickinson went down with an injury to his left leg in the Hawks’ 4-3 overtime loss to the Oilers. It folded awkwardly underneath him after incidental contact with Oilers forward Vasily Podkolzin during the second period, and he was seen in a walking boot after the game.
“It doesn’t look good,” interim coach Anders Sorensen said about Dickinson, mentioning the team will provide a more substantial update Thursday.
Sorensen started the game matching up Dickinson’s checking line against Leon Draisaitl’s line and matching up Connor Bedard’s line against Connor McDavid’s line, but the injury threw those matchups into flux.
Even still, as the clock ticked toward and past 11 p.m. CT — the game started at 8:53 p.m. due to TV slotting on TNT — the Hawks launched one of their most spirited rallies of the season, with rookie Landon Slaggert’s energy providing the spark. Ryan Donato cut the deficit to one with a power-play tip-in, then found Alec Martinez open on the back door to tie the score with 3:44 left.
Teuvo Teravainen, who had two primary assists, hit the post in the final seconds of regulation but committed a costly too-many-men penalty in overtime, and McDavid found Zach Hyman for the Oilers’ game-winner on the ensuing power play. The Hawks have now lost in an overtime or shootout in four of their last nine games.
“You can look at the bright side, say, ‘Yeah, we battled back,'” Donato said. “But if we did that without letting them have their chances and played…desperate [all night], maybe [things] could have gone a different way.”
Jason Dickinson heads to Chicago’s locker room putting very little weight on his left leg. #Blackhawks pic.twitter.com/OiQN4eqEZt
— Charlie Roumeliotis (@CRoumeliotis) February 6, 2025
Analyzing Dickinson’s season
Entering Wednesday, Dickinson didn’t know an injury was coming. Instead, he was bothered by his inability to replicate his offensive production from last season.
“I’ve been doing a pretty good job of my matchups,” Dickinson said recently. “[I’m] not necessarily winning them, but that’s because I’m not scoring. It’s frustrating, in that sense. You feel like you play a really good game against some top players, and you come out of it minus-one or something. You’re like, ‘[Expletive], I thought I played a really good game.'”
Dickinson, Teravainen and Ilya Mikhyev have formed the Hawks’ checking line for most of the season — and with good reason. Analytically, they’ve been the team’s three best defensive forwards. They entered the game with the team’s three lowest expected-goals-against rates and three of the team’s four lowest scoring-chances-allowed rates, joined in that category by Nick Foligno.
For Dickinson specifically, he has allowed slightly more expected goals per 60 minutes of five-on-five play than he did last season (2.47 vs. 2.35), when he received 18 Selke Trophy votes.
But he has allowed fewer scoring chances (23.9 vs. 26.1) and shot attempts (55.9 vs. 57.3) per 60 minutes than he did last season, and he has done so against the best offensive players in the NHL. Kirill Kaprizov, Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Nazem Kadri are the four opposing forwards he has logged the most ice time against.
Dickinson’s ability to shut down such stars is impressive, and that’s why his absence will be so costly.
He has been devoting all of his energy to doing so, though, leaving little left over to expend in the offensive zone. That has been the key difference from his breakout performance last season, when he tied Connor Bedard for the Hawks’ lead with 22 goals.
He has seven goals this season, which ranks eighth on the team at the moment, and he’s going to remain stuck in an 18-game goal drought for the duration of his injury absence.
“There was a long stretch in January and the end of December where we were losing quite substantially,” Dickinson said Wednesday. “The natural instinct for me is to retreat to my defensive habits and try to protect the ice as best I can when I’m out there, so I let my offense slide.
“There’s still little areas [where] I’m not satisfied with my decision-making. I feel like I’m making a lot of the safe plays, or I’m not trying to beat anybody one-on-one. I’m maybe a little scared to turn pucks over and end up with the puck in the back of the net. I don’t love that for my game right now.”
Dickinson’s 17.5% shooting percentage last season was always going to be difficult to repeat, but his shooting percentage this season remains above the league average at 14%. That doesn’t explain his decline in production.
Instead, these stats do: He has attempted 10.8 shots per 60 minutes, down marginally from 11.6 last season. And 35.0% of those attempts have made it on goal, down precipitously from 51.4% last season. Many more are getting blocked or missing the net.
“Part of [my] success from last year was confidence over the puck,” he said. “Once you put it in a couple of times, you start to feel good. . . . If I got the puck in a scoring area, I felt really good about picking my spots.
“This year, it seems like I’m not getting a whole lot of the same looks. Is it something I’m doing differently? Is it the way the games are going? It’s hard to say, exactly. But it’s definitely a factor.”