The season from hell continues to take its toll not only on the Hawks roster but on the fanbase as well. Friday night, the Hawks lost Bedard early in the first when he took a hit from the Devils Brendon Smith. Now, I know a lot of people aren’t happy with the hit, but when you push past the emotion of the situation, seeing our top player and the future of the franchise go down, it wasn’t a dirty hit. Watching the hit a few times, it looks like it was a case of a small player losing to the bigger guy. It's unfortunate that it resulted in a fractured jaw for Bedard, but I am glad that the team responded and made Smith answer the bell. Now what makes the whole situation even more unfortunate is losing Foligno to a fractured finger from his fight with Smith. Currently, there is no timeline for either player's return. Bedard is looking at potentially a 4-6 week recovery period, and Foligno potentially has a 6–8 week recovery period. The Hawks injury situation has officially become comical; the team will field a team this afternoon whose total cap hit ($33.2M) will be less than the cap hit that is currently on the IR list ($35.4M). With no timeline for the return of Johnson, Beauvillier, and Athanasiou and Jones, Raddysh, and Anderson just starting to skate on their own, and on top of all that there are only 10 skaters in Rockford who currently have NHL deals, KD was forced to look outside of the organization for some help.

The first move was trading a conditional 2026 7th round pick to the Penguins for forward Rem Pitlick. He was playing with the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins prior to the trade and was having a fairly decent season, registering 24 points (8-16) in 32 games. The 26-year-old is primarily used as a center, which, even before the injury curse, was an area that needed to be addressed.

The second move made by KD was claiming left winger Zach Sanford from the Arizona Coyotes. He has split his time between the NHL and AHL this season, producing little offense (4 points in the AHL and 2 points in the NHL). Sanford wasn’t being brought in to put up numbers; he is literally only coming in because the team needs bodies.

What was already going to be a tough season has gotten that much tougher, and the fact we don’t have Bedard to numb the pain a bit makes it that much tougher of a pill to swallow. However, I know all of us Hawks fans can remember a time period when this team was almost unwatchable, so I think we can survive a few weeks of this, especially knowing that better times are on the horizon. The night is darkest before dawn, and the morning is coming, which is good enough for me to manage for now.

That’s going to be it for me. Hawks versus Flames is set for a 2 p.m. central puck drop, and as always, Let's Go Hawks.

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