Just when Blackhawks fans thought it was safe to stick their head out of the hole, the Hawks get clobbered by Columbus.  For the casual observer of hockey, losing 8-3 in hockey is like losing 17-1 in baseball or 52-3 in football.  Giving up eight goals in a game (including four in the second period) is a meltdown of epic proportions.

What scares you is that these are the lowly Bluejackets we are talking about.  Columbus, a team that fired their coach Ken Hitchcock earlier this year, sits fourteenth out of fifteen teams in the Western Conference, with a grand total of 74 points.  In comparison, the Hawks have 99 points and sit second in the West, one point behind San Jose.  What should have been a free spot on the BINGO board turned into a nightmare.

Cristobal Huet, was for a lack of a better term, horrible, surrendering seven goals on 27 shots.  Antti Niemi spelled Huet for part of the second, letting in one goal himself. 

The Hawks were supposed to use the last ten games of the regular season as a tune up for the playoffs, instead they got tuned up.

If Hawks GM Stan Bowman wasn't concerned about the Hawks less than spectacular goaltending, he has to be now.  And unfortunately, there is nothing he can do about it.  The Hawks will have to go to war with what they have and clearly Niemi becomes the less of the two evils.  Huet has been awful as of late.  Yes, I know he just came back from the flu last night, but that's no excuse to giving up seven goals to a team that is seventeenth in scoring and twenty-eighth in wins.  That's SEVEN goals for crying out loud.

A game like this has to serve as a wake up call.  The Hawks have been sputtering the last ten games and this loss puts an exclamation point on the fact that this team is capable of an early playoff exit should it not be able to turn things around. 

Instead of hauling around Lord Stanley's Cup this June, the only thing the Hawks will be hauling around will be their golf bags.