The Blackhawks need to give the crease back to struggling Corey Crawford
A couple facts before getting to the point:
The Chicago Blackhawks organization unquestionably believes that, in the big picture, Corey Crawford is a better goaltender than Scott Darling. He’s making Scrooge McDuck money per season through 2018-19, so it behooves them to give him every opportunity to succeed.
To win the Stanley Cup - a two-month tournament that requires 16 wins against the best teams in hockey - teams need great goaltending.
Given those two statements, the best-case scenario for the Blackhawks is that Corey Crawford - their big-picture-better goaltender - feels confident and plays well while helping the Blackhawks through the wars of tight playoff hockey en route to the Stanley Cup.
The unfortunate reality is that through two starts Crawford has been nothing short of dog meat, giving up nine goals on 47 shots, including a few that would make a rec league ‘tender cringe. You absolutely can’t blame the Hawks for wanting to give him a night on the bench to gather himself. “Sit down, take some deep breaths, get some sleep, hit the reset button.” (After all, this is a guy who’s performed admirably in previous post-seasons, putting up a save percentage over .920 prior to this year's rough start.)
Still, you have to think the Blackhawks’ coaching staff knew it had a great chance to win Game 3 regardless of who was in net. They were returning home, Shea Weber was out of the lineup for Nashville and they were coming off a game in which they were trounced. And keep in mind, this is not a team that gets trounced often, meaning a bounce-back effort was fairly likely, if not near certain.
To me, that’s the prime situation for Crawford to get his first “W” of the 2015 playoffs and get his game headed in the right direction. If he skates off the ice with a 4-2, 4-3 win - or a win of any nature - the monkey is off the back and he can start finding that groove, like a slumping player finally burying one on an empty net.
By not starting him and giving Darling the comparably winnable game you create a potential goalie controversy in the middle of the playoffs, where the Blackhawks have the type of team that could put together a deep run.
It’s possible that Crawford’s first two postseason performances put Joel Quenneville and Co. in a position where they genuinely believed he wouldn’t be able to snap the slump and he’d continue playing so badly they’d lose a winnable game. With the series tied at 1-1, maybe they considered that possibility too risky (after all, they tried to go back to him in Game 2 and he was awful again).
If they did, that’s OK. They’ve still got another crack at this.
The Blackhawks are up 2-1 and a similar situation awaits them in Game 4. Crawford has now fit in a few more practice reps with Chicago's goalie coach Jimmy Waite and taken a night off, while the next game again looks winnable (at home, no Weber). Chicago needs to give the crease back to him before Darling gets another win and the team finds itself heading deeper into the playoffs with its back-up starting. If he were actually the better goalie, he wouldn’t be the back-up, and if he starts to regress back to his true talent, you could be looking at giving up a few extra goals later in the playoffs where the opponents are better and everything matters that little bit more.
You can’t force a guy struggling to snap out of his slump, and there’s only so long that it makes sense to keep betting on a failing player. But by not giving the go-to guy a chance to succeed, there’s a potential for problems where none need to exist.