Pressure mounting on Kyle Davidson to make changes after Blackhawks' atrocious 9-2 loss

RALEIGH, N.C. — The existing mountain of pressure on Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson to make changes to the team this week grew to the size of Mt. Everest on Saturday.

An awful-beyond-words 9-2 loss to the Hurricanes made it exceedingly clear the Hawks cannot play another game in their current form.

Entering this difficult southern road trip, the four-day break in the schedule that has now arrived looked like a possible boiling point. After going 0-3 on the trip and concluding it with their most lopsided defeat in almost three years, that water is now veritably boiling.

The only questions concern what Davidson will do and when he'll do it.

Saturday certainly looked like the kind of game that can get a coach fired, for one thing, although coach Jeff Blashill said afterward that he isn't thinking about his job security.

He said he believes there's trust between him and the players and between him and management. But he acknowledged this four-day break needs to be significant, one way or another.

"We've got to make this a bottom point in the year, and we've got to find a way to claw our way out of this," Blashill said.

"Is there any tweak to anything we do that can put our guys in a better position to win games? We'll look at that tonight. Not that we haven't, but we'll certainly do a deep dive tonight into tomorrow and see if there's any kind of solutions that we can give to these guys."

Trades, too?

Trades involving the playing roster seem both necessary and likely, too.

Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman reported Saturday the Hawks have become very active on the trade market, shopping the the Oilers' and Panthers' first-round picks they own as well as their plethora of second-round picks.

Friedman also mentioned pending free agents Teuvo Teravainen and Jordan Greenway are being shopped, presumably to make room for guys brought in.

The Hawks still have more than three quarters of the season left, and they certainly could use an injection of talent to at least deliver a respectable product during that span.

But at 4-13-1, they've already dug a hole so deep that it's fair to whether it would be wise to invest any more assets into this current season.

Atrocious effort

Blashill has defended the Hawks' effort levels after most of their losses this season, but he didn't Saturday. Nor did Connor Bedard, who called it an "embarrassing" loss.

The Hawks made basically every mistake possible and, on a few Hurricanes goals, seemed to either forget basic fundamentals of hockey or even stop trying altogether.

The Hurricanes' third, fifth and sixth goals were particularly egregious from a Hawks perspective. On the third, the fourth line of Jordan Greenway, Dillon Boucher and Cole Smith attempted the least effective 2-1-2 forecheck of all time, which the Hurricanes carved up immediately to get a two-on-one rush that Jordan Martinook finished off.

On the fifth, Roman Kantserov committed an inexcusable defensive-zone turnover, Tyler Bertuzzi and Bedard were burned for lazy stick-based defense and Artyom Levshunov and Alex Vlasic made little effort to stop Andrei Svechnikov from burying his own rebound.

On the sixth, Kaiser made a terrible decision pass into the slot with three Hawks forwards deep and three Hurricanes in the way, creating an instant two-on-one rush that Sebastian Aho finished off. That made it 6-0 barely halfway through the game.

The Hawks held a players-only meeting after the final horn in which they vented frustrations, floated ideas for changes and tried to "get to the reality" of the current situation, Kaiser said.

"There’s frustration all the time when you’re waking up, when you’re going to bed, you’re thinking about the record and the hole that we’re in," said Bedard, who's facing his own mountain of adversity just two months into his captaincy.

"What we’ve been able to do really well is every practice, every pregame skate, every lunch, [every] dinner, every time we hang out, we still have that camaraderie and have that joy to be at the rink. But at the end of the day, it’s a results league, and we’ve got to be better. There's nothing else to do it."

For now, the Hawks are scheduled to have a day off Sunday and practice Monday before the annual season-ticket member party that night.