Ryan Donato has played much better since scoring this long-awaited goal March 2 against the Blue Jackets.
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On March 2, when Blackhawks forward Ryan Donato was positioned perfectly in the slot, received a centering pass and flubbed his shot wide, he felt like he would never score again.
He had gone 26 consecutive games without hitting the net, keeping him stuck on six goals for the season after depositing 14 and 16 the last two years in Seattle.
Later that same game against the Blue Jackets, however, his luck finally changed. As he followed up a Philipp Kurashev one-man rush, the puck bounced off the end-wall right in front of him, and he simply tapped it across the line beneath the goaltender. Suddenly, he had not a 26-game goalless streak but a one-game scoring streak.
“It’s funny [how] you get one in the net and things start to change, right?” Donato said Thursday. “You can look at Connor [Bedard] for an example. He had that one [drought], and he gets one that sneaks in and he catches fire.”
Donato’s recent surge since that lucky bounce hasn’t been quite as dramatic as Bedard’s, but the 27-year-old journeyman has nonetheless played his best hockey of the season over the past few weeks. He now touts three goals in his last six games and six points in his last eight.
“Even before he scored over the last few games, he was just skating better,” coach Luke Richardson said. “He was more determined. He was just free. At some point [during a slump], you get to the point where you just forget about it and just play, and I think that’s what he did.”
Richardson has particularly liked Donato’s trigger-happy shooting and physical forechecking.
He has a very good shot, and although he hasn’t shown it as much as hoped this season, he does rank third on the team with 30 shot attempts during the last six games — behind only Bedard and Seth Jones. His goal Sunday against the Coyotes was an especially pretty top-corner snipe.
Earlier on Sunday, however, he made just as much of an impact on a shift on which he didn’t score. Instead, he singlehandedly led two forechecks, beating Coyotes goalie Connor Ingram to a dumped-in puck and then delivering a crushing hit on Coyotes defenseman J.J. Moser.
The hit on Moser woke up a sleepy crowd and forced a clearance that gave the Hawks possession. Twenty-two seconds later, Bedard scored the Hawks’ first goal in their comeback win. Richardson called it one of Donato’s best performances of the season.
Donato admits he would feel better about his late-season resurgence if the Hawks were in the playoff race and these games truly mattered, but he’s also glad the team as a whole has played better lately. The more offensive-zone time they have, the more opportunities he and his teammates have to make positive contributions.
As one of the team’s most religious players, he thinks the Hawks spending so much time in Chicago lately — enabling him to attend church more frequently — has helped, too.
“I just keep on praying that, if [I] do the hard work, things will go well for [me],” he said. “Right now, things seem to be going that way.”