How new Blackhawks coach Anders Sorensen can help spark Connor Bedard’s play

The Chicago Blackhawks became the third team in the NHL to fire their head coach on Thursday, letting go of Luke Richardson and letting Anders Sorensen, who was the head coach of the Rockford IceHogs, take over as an interim head coach.

It was a bit of a surprising move considering that the Blackhawks don’t really have expectations to compete just yet, but they were likely hoping to get a bit more out of their roster this year, especially from Connor Bedard, who has just 5 goals and 19 points in 26 games.

WGN Radio’s Charlie Roumeliotis joined Daily Faceoff Live to talk about the coaching change and how it might help Bedard and company.

Charlie Roumeliotis: I think with the Blackhawks winning the lottery of Connor Bedard, fans wanted this to be a quick process after that happened. And the difference between this and when the Blackhawks won the Kane lottery and they had Jonathan Toews is those guys were stepping into a perfect infrastructure already where there was Patrick Sharp, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, they signed Marion Hossa the next year. So they were walking into an unbelievable situation.

With Connor, that was the first part of the rebuild, but they still have so many first-round picks after that that none of those guys were going to sniff the NHL right away and even Oliver Moore, who they took in Connor’s draft class, is still in college, so he hasn’t even made the jump over to the pros yet.

So I don’t think this is the Blackhawks regressing in any way. I just think the Hawks were hoping to see incremental progress in the standings and they haven’t seen that, and to couple that with the fact that Connor Bedard is struggling and they couldn’t roll back the same kind of feeling after the first two months of the season.

You can watch the full episode here…