The Mammoth are learning playoff lessons in season series with the Blackhawks

The 30th-placed Chicago Blackhawks have officially swept the four-game season series with the likely playoff-bound Utah Mammoth.

Three of those games came in the last 12 days, with the Blackhawks taking two of them in overtime — including Thursday night’s contest, 3-2.

The Mammoth are uplifted by the fact that they still get points out of those losses, but once the playoffs begin, an OT loss is nothing more than a loss.

Of course, this wasn’t a playoff series, but there are certain lessons Utah can learn from it that will help if and when it gets to the postseason.

“The similarity, for me, is the adjustment you can make and how you can adapt to certain things,” Mammoth head coach André Tourigny said after Thursday night’s contest at the Delta Center.

“... I like the fact we were able to adjust tactically. There’s more to that in the playoffs — there’s the emotion, the stress, the physicality, the grind and the fatigue and all of it, but still you need to adapt to your opponent and try to take what they do good away and exploit the little holes they have, and in the NHL, there’s not a lot of holes.”

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As Tourigny mentioned, the physicality always increases in the playoffs. That’s part of what makes them so exciting. In that sense, the Mammoth stepped up on Thursday.

Jack McBain hasn’t scored a goal since Jan. 13, but he contributed 10 hits on Thursday (one shy of Liam O’Brien’s franchise record, which he set on Jan. 20, 2025).

Michael Carcone, meanwhile, threw eight hits, and Lawson Crouse gave five.

“It’s getting the team involved, but also getting myself involved,” McBain said after the game. “You know, I’m trying to get energy out there, get the guys going.

“We’ve had some tough games against them and (I’m) just trying to come out physical and change this one.”

If Utah does make the playoffs this season — and its seven-point lead over the best non-playoff teams in the Western Conference gives it good odds at this point — it will take a bit of adjusting.

There are plenty of examples of experience prevailing in recent playoff series. While the Mammoth’s defensemen and some of their bottom forwards have a decent amount of postseason experience, Nick Schmaltz is Utah’s only top-nine forward who has played a playoff game with fans in the stands.

As GM Bill Armstrong pointed out in a recent interview with the Deseret News, it takes a significant amount of “growth and pain” to build a Stanley Cup-contending team. If the Mammoth can do their growing in moments like this mini series with Chicago, it could expedite their playoff success.