The Blackhawks — a subpar team with a subpar prospect pool — don’t currently own a first-round pick in this year’s NHL draft.
To put it bluntly, that’s a bad situation.
Much has been said and written about ex-general manager Stan Bowman’s decision to relinquish the Hawks’ 2018 first-round pick (Adam Boqvist), 2021 first-round pick (moving down from 12th to 32nd overall) and 2022 first-round pick (albeit with top-two protection) as three major parts of the Seth Jones trade.
Regardless of how that blockbuster deal is analyzed in retrospect, however, it cannot be undone. Interim general manager Kyle Davidson — along with whatever outside talent is brought in to flesh out the Hawks’ hockey operations department — can only move forward with the wreckage they inherited.
Accordingly, Davidson’s top priority between now and the March 21 trade deadline should be to reacquire a first-round pick.
The Hawks simply cannot afford to enter their imminent rebuilding era without one. If they did, they’d be rebuilding around almost nothing — outside of Lukas Reichel, there might not exist another future top-six forward (or top-pair defenseman) anywhere in their pipeline. It would delay the entire process by at least a year.
There is a chance a miracle draw could rescue their original selection. If the season ended Friday, the eighth-to-last-place Hawks would have a 12% chance of winning the lottery for first or second overall, triggering the top-two protection clause and returning the pick to them from the Blue Jackets. In that case, the Hawks would not only have a first-round pick but a franchise-altering one.
Davidson nonetheless must assume the 88%-likely alternate outcome will occur instead, and that he’ll need to pry a first-rounder out of another team’s hands.
Trading Marc-Andre Fleury is the most logical, obvious route to consider. But even that process — and particularly getting a first-round, rather than second-round, pick in exchange — will require creativity and negotiation.
The Hawks may well need to retain up to 50% of Fleury’s $7 million cap hit to make it easier for his new team to financially fit him.
They’ll probably need to stir up competing trade offers from several suitors around the league to drive up the price. The Oilers (27th in team save percentage), Avalanche (21st) and Capitals (18th) are the three most logical suitors, although the Avalanche — despite being perhaps the most logical of all — don’t have a 2022 first-rounder. But could the Penguins or Maple Leafs, who both rank top-10 in team save percentage but with relatively unproven goalies, also join the sweepstakes?
The Hawks might have to slightly sweeten the pot, as well, attaching one of their many depth players to Fleury to bump the return over the first-round threshold.
And before any of that, they’ll have to convince Fleury to accept a trade. He officially wields a partial no-trade clause, but he might functionally have even more say than that, considering the Hawks’ presumed reluctance to double-cross him after convincing him to come to Chicago last summer. Fleury said publicly Thursday he hasn’t yet considered the trade possibility.
“[It’s] not my thought yet,” he said. “All I want is to have this team make the playoffs. Honestly, that’s what is in my head right now. To me, it’s not worth looking too far ahead.”
There are a few other conceivable scenarios that could push the Hawks back into the first round, such as packaging one of their three third-round picks with one of their other trade-bait players (Dylan Strome, Calvin de Haan or Dominik Kubalik), but they’d be even trickier to execute.
None of the options will be simple or painless, but nor is parting with a first-round pick from another team’s perspective. For the sake of their future, though, the Hawks must find a partner ultimately willing to do so — and then find a way to make it work.
