I know it’s been several days since it happened, but my mind still keeps venturing back to how delightful it was to spend a Sunday afternoon watching a couple of young stars do the things that Connor Bedard and Caleb Williams did last weekend. It wasn’t long after the final horn sounded on yet another multi-point performance from No. 98 that Williams reeled off a pair of late touchdowns to secure yet another Bears victory.
It’s easy to draw comparisons between the two, even if their sports are wildly different. Yeah, Bedard is in a pretty important role as the No. 1 center of the future but there’s a weight involved with being a starting quarterback in the NFL that dwarfs the responsibilities of a top-line pivot in the NHL. There’s an additional burden on Williams that is not on Bedard, because Bedard is playing for a franchise that still has a trio of titles in the last 15 years while Williams’ franchise hasn’t had one in 40 years while playing the position that the team has never really figured out (which is probably why they haven’t won that title in 40 years). But they both embody the same thing: hope. Bedard offers hope that the last several seasons of enduring the teardown/tanking portions of this painfully long Blackhawks rebuild are finally things of the past and that the brighter days we’ve been waiting for in the future are inching closer and closer to the present. Williams offers hope that his franchise has finally entered the 21st century and may have a real-life, legitimate, franchise QB for the first time … ever? That Bears fans may finally get to experience the feeling that seemingly every other NFL fan base had: knowing there’s a guy behind center who can be singlehandedly responsible for victories multiple times over the course of a season, building the skill set that often results in consistent, deep runs into the playoffs.
The other thing about the existence of these two in Chicago at the same time is that they bring hope to a city that has been desperate for some sports success. One of these days I’ll sit down and finish doing the math on it but the front half of the 2020s offered some of the darkest days in Chicago sports history based on the collective winning percentages of the professional teams in the city. But now the Hawks seem to be trending up again, coinciding with a spurt of Bears victories as well. The Bulls are having a surprising start, too. The Cubs were back in the postseason this year, as were the Fire. The Stars and Sky are having some rough stretches following better days but it seems like the Sox could be past the worst of theirs.
So, yeah, hope is much easier to find in Chicago sports these days. Been a while, hasn’t it?
The Week That Was
Friday, Nov. 7: Blackhawks 4, Flames 0
Calgary seemed awfully grumpy during this game, didn’t they?
Sunday, Nov. 9: Blackhawks 5, Red Wings 1
This Tyler Bertuzzi thing sure is something, eh?
Wednesday, Nov. 12: Devils 4, Blackhawks 3
If New Jersey can get and then stay healthy, it should be a real problem out East.
Distant Suns
One thing theme that’s emerged from multiple corners of the Blackhawks-centric portions of the internet — and was reflected in the ice time numbers from Wednesday’s game against the Devils — is that Sam Rinzel isn’t having the best time in his first full NHL season. He only skated 11:29 against the Devils, easily his lowest mark of the season and less than half of the 23:22 he was averaging in that nine-game sample from the end of last season. It’s been a largely downhill trend for him since he skated a season-high 25:58 against Montreal in the third game of the season.
He only has three points (1 G, 2 A) this season, which is probably below what to expect from a player with his particular skill set who was seeing ample power-play time. Some angles of that were also explored in our most recent podcast, with that particular topic coming up during the back half of the conversation.
But I was curious on how that compared with the debut seasons for other blue-liners who’d come up through the college ranks. I found four other players who spent two seasons in college and then made the leap to the NHL, similar to Rinzel did. Whether or not they had cups of coffee in March/April like Rinzel did wasn’t factored, as this sample focused on what they did at the start of an NHL seasons. There were four recent examples of other first-round picks who fit this bill, although the sample can be a touch unfair to Rinzel, who was picked No. 25 overall, as the other four players went in the top 10: New Jersey’s Luke Hughes, Vancouver’s Quinn Hughes, Buffalo’s Owen Power and Ottawa’s Jake Sanderson.
The idea here was to put all of their numbers together in a table with Rinzel’s and see of anything significant stands out. Some possession metrics relative to their team figures were included to account for the potential quality of their team (or lack thereof). Here are the numbers:
Player Season GP G A P ATOI CF% xGF% oZS% Rel CF% Rel xGF%
Rinzel 2025-26 17 1 2 3 18:25 46.72 46.97 52.60 2.10 0.16
L. Hughes 2023-24 17 1 9 10 19:17 57.00 53.56 53.52 2.48 0.89
Q. Hughes 2019-20 17 2 10 12 20:48 55.04 58.29 64.33 2.71 5.46
Power 2022-23 17 0 8 8 24:52 53.82 51.47 59.15 1.28 2.96
Sanderson 2022-23 17 0 9 9 21:38 51.61 51.41 45.1 0.12 -0.28
Other than the point production, Rinzel doesn’t seem to be too far off, does he? Yes, his CF% and xGF% are well below that of the other skaters, but when related to the team performance in those categories, Rinzel didn’t make the Hawks significantly better or worse than the other players on this chart.
This isn’t to say that Rinzel is going to be the same level of player as any of the other names in that table. But it does suggest that what Rinzel is doing right now isn’t miles away from what other talented young blue-liners have done during their first full NHL seasons. Still plenty of time for Rinzel to figure this all out and if a brief trip up I-90 is what it takes, so be it.
The Week That Will Be
Saturday, Nov. 15: Blackhawks vs. Maple Leafs
So maybe Mitch Marner wasn’t the problem after all?
Tuesday, Nov. 18: Blackhawks vs. Flames
These guys again?