Complete Preview for the Chicago Blackhawks' 2014-15 Season

The Chicago Blackhawks are among the elite of the NHL. The regular season matters very little to them—the same can be said for the Los Angeles Kings—as they are built to win a championship and are the rare squad that possesses the ability to flip a switch for the second season.

Consider the final quarter of last season, when the Blackhawks finished 11-11-1 to relinquish the Central Division to the Colorado Avalanche. The Blackhawks lost the first two games of their first-round series to the Blues before winning six in a row and eight of 10 to reach the conference finals.

With a virtually identical team returning this season, the regular season is just as meaningless.

What We Learned in 2013-14

The Blackhawks are really good. They have a lot of good hockey players, a few great ones, who are good and great at playing hockey.

To sit here and explain that the Blackhawks are really good is akin to those anti-smoking ads where the lady talks through her neck or the guy pulls out his teeth. We all know the Blackhawks are really good. We all know smoking is bad.

Tell you something you don't know?

OK, did you know that there is a strong case to be made that Niklas Hjalmarsson is the Blackhawks' top defenseman? Yeah, Duncan Keith won the Norris Trophy last year, but that's largely because he finished with the most points among defensemen, and by Hockey Law, he has to win the Norris unless he is Russian.

Harry How/Getty Images

But Hjalmarsson found himself matching with top competition more frequently than Keith and wasn't seeing much power-play time, so you'll have to excuse him for only posting four goals and 26 points in 81 games.

Maybe you knew that already. I don't know. I can't speak to your hockey knowledge.

But the big thing we learned (and perhaps already knew) is Corey Crawford forever will be the weak link on a team that can win a championship this year and perhaps in any of the next five years.

After posting the best numbers of his career in a goofy, shortened 2013 season that ended with the Blackhawks winning a Stanley Cup, the Blackhawks lost their minds and handed him a six-year, $36 million extension that begins in 2014-15. Crawford had a career-best 1.94/.926 split in the regular season and followed that with 16 wins and a .932 save percentage in the postseason.

Instead of seeing that as anomaly in a 48-game season, the Blackhawks married themselves to Crawford and watched him let them down during the only part of the season that matters—the playoffs.

Crawford's regular-season save percentage fell to .917 but was .912 over three rounds of the playoffs. Where it really hurt was the conference finals, when a mediocre—no, simply a bad goaltender could've gotten the Blackhawks past the scuffling Jonathan Quick and the Kings—Crawford was vomitus. 

Crawford allowed 26 goals in seven games against the Kings, offering a putrid .878 save percentage in the process. He allowed at least four goals in a game seven times during the 2014 postseason.

Anyone can have a bad series in the playoffs, and Crawford's .917 save percentage in the regular season is plenty good enough for Chicago to have success. But, again, all that matters to the Blackhawks is the playoffs, and this will be their goaltender in the playoffs for the next six years.

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

Outlook for 2014-15

Smoking is still bad for you, and the Blackhawks are still really good, and Crawford is still the biggest liability.

The More You Know.

There's no reason the Blackhawks shouldn't find themselves in the conference finals for a third season in a row. The Avalanche are coming off a fluky season and got worse during the summer; the Blues are the store-brand version of the Blackhawks your mom buys when she's grocery shopping to save money, and the Wild, Predators and blah blah blah the Blackhawks are the best team in the Central by a miracle mile.

Although the Blackhawks are pressed against the cap like a child in the window of a candy store (do candy stores still exist?), they found a way to get a little better by replacing Michal Handzus with Brad Richards as the team's second-line center.

In his past three seasons, Handzus has 13 goals and 48 points in his past 165 games; Richards had 20 goals and 51 points in 82 games last season.

Left wing	Center	Right wing
Patrick Sharp	Jonathan Toews	Marian Hossa
Brandon Saad	Brad Richards	Patrick Kane
Bryan Bickell	Andrew Shaw	Kris Versteeg
Jeremy Morin	Marcus Kruger	Ben Smith
Peter Regin, Teuvo Teravainen

Considering Richards did that without Patrick Kane and on his wing and Handzus did most of that with Patrick Kane on his wing, it's easy to see the potential for the Blackhawks' second line to be even more explosive this season.

And even if Richards doesn't work out, the Blackhawks have Teuvo Teravainen, the 20-year-old Finnish prospect who could have a big role with the Blackhawks this season. With the Blackhawks in a cap crunch, Teravainen making less than $900,000, he could find himself on the opening-night roster.

But even if he starts the season elsewhere, he is without question in the team's long-term plans.

The only difference between last year's defense corps and this year's is the fact they are all a year older.

Left defense	Right defense	Goaltenders
Duncan Keith	Brent Seabrook	Corey Crawford
Johnny Oduya	Niklas Hjalmarsson	Antti Raanta
Nick Leddy	Michal Rozsival
David Rundblad

If there's anything to worry about with this group it's is the wear and tear that comes with consecutive deep playoff runs. Will it wear down over the course of 2014-15? Duncan Keith is 31; Brent Seabrook is 29, and Michal Rozsival is 36. Keith and Seabrook are hardly old-timers, but coach Joel Quenneville would be wise to monitor their workloads since, as you may recall, all that matters in Chicago is the playoffs.

The Blackhawks will enter the regular season as the first- or second-best team in the NHL and will likely end the season as the first- or second-best team in the NHL.

A third Stanley Cup in six years will likely come down again to whether Crawford is his 2013 self or his 2014 self once the playoffs roll around.

All statistics via NHL.com.

Dave Lozo covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @DaveLozo.