4 Stats to Judge the Chicago Blackhawks by This Season

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I don’t even want to type the sentence that comes after this one because every Chicago Blackhawks fan, writer, and Monday morning quarterback (centerman?) has uttered it ad nauseam.

The 2025-26 season is a monumentally important one for the Blackhawks.

I don’t even need to tell you why. So I won’t.

Related: Blackhawks 2025 Training Camp Notebook: Davidson, Blashill, Foligno, Dach, Murphy, More

What I haven’t heard or read much about is how we will know if the Blackhawks “take the next step” this season. How do we measure that beyond the eye test, beyond a gut feeling?

Here are four Blackhawks statistics from the 2024-25 season that the team must improve, along with my prediction of whether they will.

Wins

Let’s start with the obvious: Wins.

More wins mean improvement—that’s the clearest indicator we will have. The Blackhawks finished second-worst in the league with 25 wins last season, an abysmal .372 winning percentage.

The Blackhawks last eclipsed 30 wins during the shortened 2019-20 season, although the team’s .491 winning percentage in the shortened 56-game season in 2020-21 would’ve seen them finish with 40 wins. Regardless, they have finished with 26, 23, and 25 wins the last three seasons, undoubtedly the most difficult of this rebuild.

How many wins this season is realistic? The buzz around the team is positive. Connor Bedard enters his third season looking bigger and stronger. Frank Nazar signed a long-term contract this summer allowing him to focus on improving. Sam Rinzel will attempt to pick up where he left off after a short but impressive stint with the Blackhawks last season. Prospects like Nick Lardis aim to earn a spot and prove how they fit into the rebuild.

But will that be enough to win more games?

Yes, it will, and here’s why.

The reins have been handed over to the young players entirely. Sure, veterans like captain Nick Foligno and Connor Murphy will play and lead, but, unlike last season, there aren’t any older players taking up roster spots. The competition will ignite fires in the players and the team as they identify and seize their opportunities.

Don’t expect 40 or 50 wins. But at least 30 is possible. In fact, if I may be so bold, I’m expecting 33 wins this season. That’s eight more than last season with at least a 16-point improvement. That isn’t the most exciting improvement, but there will be growing pains as new head coach Jeff Blashill implements his systems and the young guns adjust to NHL hockey.

But it is improvement.

Goals For

To win, you need to score goals (my incisive NHL coverage continues, I know. Hold the applause). To say the Blackhawks have struggled to score is as obvious as saying don’t drink out of the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day (or any day, really).

The Blackhawks scored 226 goals last season, seventh-worst in the league. That was a marked improvement compared to the 2023-24 season, when the team scored a paltry 179 goals. But the team has finished with the fewest goals scored in two of the past three seasons.

The infusion of young talent should help the Blackhawks score more. Bedard will lead that charge. Lardis, if he makes the roster, proved he can score after netting 71 goals in the Ontario Hockey League last season. As defensemen like Rinzel and Artyom Levshunov become more comfortable, their playmaking abilities will show whether by scoring themselves or setting up the forwards.

The pieces are there. And, as I wrote above, the drive and compete should be too.

Prediction? Let’s see if the Blackhawks can eclipse 250 goals for this season. That would most likely place them in the top half of the league. And that jump would prove not only that players are rising to the challenge but also that the team clicked on more cylinders than last season (e.g. the power play).

Goals Against

To continue my brilliant insight, it doesn’t matter how many goals you score if you allow more. Unfortunately, the Blackhawks didn’t improve in this category as they did in scoring last season.

The team allowed 296 goals last season, second-worst in the NHL. That was six more goals against than the 2023-24 season. The good news is that the team’s goal differential remained the same at minus-70 between the two seasons. Well, I don’t know if that’s good news, but at least the increased scoring helped cancel out some of the goals against.

Spencer Knight Chicago Blackhawks
Spencer Knight enters the 2025-26 season with high hopes after signing a three-year contract extension. (Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images)

This stat proves why we are looking at a host of different numbers here. How many goals the Blackhawks allow is the second-most significant indicator of improvement or lack thereof.

The Blackhawks fielded a young team last season that struggled defensively. From implementing systems to staying fresh throughout the 82-game grind, the fact is the Blackhawks haven’t had the NHL experience to compete for an entire 60 minutes. Anyone who watched a game last season often saw two entirely different teams throughout a game, switching into a higher gear too late in the third period or falling asleep after showing flashes of what could be in the first two periods.

While the team will be one year older, I’m not convinced they’re going to take that next step defensively, the step that separates the boys from the men.

However, there are reasons for optimism. Goaltender Spencer Knight will suit up for his first full season in the net. Blashill will emphasize the small details of the game—stick checking, back checking, and not cheating in the defensive zone—that too often went by the wayside. And he’ll hold the players accountable for a lack of effort.

This is what you want to see from a head coach: a higher standard being set. Unfortunately, practices are not games, and there’s a certain amount of experience that can only be imbued through regular season games. (Relatedly, the same is true of playoff games and regular season games; that’s why many teams that win the Stanley Cup recently lost in the Final.)

The Blackhawks still need some of that experience before they will drastically improve defensively. For that reason and more, I expect the goals against to improve slightly but not as drastically as we want. Let’s say the 270s.

Faceoff Winning Percentage

The ability to win a faceoff is often underappreciated. Greats like Sidney Crosby worked relentlessly to become dominant, and even he only wins about 53% of the draws he takes.

Faceoffs require a blend of skill, strength, and hockey IQ that takes time to hone. It’s a fine detail of the game that many talented forwards don’t have to focus on before they make it to the NHL. But when you’re in the NHL, and every player is good at almost everything, you focus on the areas that will give you an edge—something that takes time and patience to master.

This explains why the Blackhawks finished with the second-worst faceoff percentage last season (44.8%). The two oldest (officially listed) centermen last season were Jason Dickinson and Teuvo Teravainen. The rest were hardly more than 20.

How the Blackhawks fared in faceoffs is an under-the-radar indicator of their youth and inexperience. Of course, winning faceoffs doesn’t guarantee success (the New York Islanders finished with the best percentage last season and didn’t make the playoffs). But the top ten teams were in the hunt for a playoff spot or contending in the playoffs.

That’s because winning faceoffs requires strength and maturity that the Blackhawks didn’t have. This season, I expect that number to increase. Players like Bedard realize how important these details are and have worked on improving.

The number won’t spike to over 50%, but I won’t be surprised if it goes up a few percentage points. Let’s call it somewhere between 47% and 48%.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (Usually)

Hockey is a combination of statistics and human will. The statistics measure trends and help us understand what’s happening and why. The human will breaks those trends and proves no player is bound by numbers.

What the Blackhawks achieve this season will depend on whether the team has the willpower and work ethic to improve the above statistics. They have the talent and experience to do so in some areas, while in others, I’m not so sure.

Either way, the Blackhawks will be judged by the numbers. Whether the players rise to that occasion or not is the question.

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