Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson made so many trades over the past two weeks that he had practically nothing left to do on the NHL’s official deadline day Friday.
Instead, Davidson took some time to reflect on not only the most frenetic period of his yearlong tenure to date — he passed the first anniversary of his interim tag removal Wednesday — but also one of the more frenetic periods any GM will ever experience.
“It truly was a whirlwind,” Davidson said. “The start of this last road trip feels like three weeks ago, even though it was just a couple days. So it has been really busy, really hectic. [There have been] lots of different things flying around, lots of scenarios. But in the end, as I look back on it now...[I’m] just really really happy with what we were able to accomplish.”
Coach Luke Richardson joked that Davidson would need a “week of sleep,” to which Davidson retorted that he was “over-tired” and would “probably just stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours.”
The Hawks did contribute one small move to the league total of 21 trades Friday, acquiring depth forward Austin Wagner from the Kings for future considerations.
Andreas Athanasiou, the one player left entering Friday who both made sense to trade (as a pending free agent) and had been mentioned in recent rumors, conversely managed to emerge unscathed. Davidson said he was never “actively pursuing moving” the speedy winger.
But the vast majority of the legwork to flip existing players into draft picks — in accordance with Davidson’s drawn-out, scorched-earth rebuilding plan — had already been done via eight previous trades since Feb. 22.
Leaving out the multitude of AHL players involved, the Hawks essentially exchanged Patrick Kane, Max Domi, Sam Lafferty, Jake McCabe, Jack Johnson and two fifth-round picks for one first-round pick, four second-round picks, two fourth-round picks, Andreas Englund, Nikita Zaitsev, Joey Anderson, Anders Bjork and Wagner.
Those moves left the Hawks’ current roster as bare as any the NHL has seen in its salary-cap era but added to the franchise’s impressive array of draft picks.
They now own eight picks in the first three rounds of the 2023 draft, six picks in the first three rounds in the 2024 draft and five picks in the first three rounds of the 2025 draft. Davidson intentionally spread out those selections, too.
“We want the talent to come in waves,” he said. “We don’t just want one hit in one or two drafts. We want multiple drafts and to keep that talent coming up through the ranks. And then additionally, those draft picks in 2025 and 2026, they’re only going to get more valuable as we move forward.
“Whether we make those picks is a different story, but we can use those picks to look at acquiring some players that fill those gaps [in our prospect pool] that may arise along the way through holes in our development.”
The new players will fill out the NHL lineup through the April 13 season finale so the Hawks won’t need to expose too many prospects to their many losses down the stretch.
Zaitsev, an ex-Senators defenseman, is the only new player with term left on his contract — a bloated one with a $4.5 million salary-cap hit, which enabled the Hawks to receive two picks for taking him. Fellow defenseman Englund and forwards Anderson, Bjork and Wagner are all pending free agents — as is goalie Anton Khudobin, who came from the Stars (in the Domi trade) with his own hefty cap hit but will be buried in the AHL.
Wagner, Friday’s lone acquisition, has played exclusively in the AHL the last two seasons, but he does tout 171 prior games of NHL experience and will soon be adding to that total.
The players the Hawks moved out are of much greater significance, of course. Davidson hit roughly market value for McCabe with salary retained (first-round pick), Lafferty (second-round pick) and Domi (second-round pick).
The Kane trade return, however, was undeniably unsatisfying to both the front office and the fan base, even though Davidson’s hands were tied — he couldn’t have done anything differently while remaining fair to Kane.
“It wasn’t the type of return that we would have gotten if there was no ‘no-move clause,’” Davidson admitted. “Or if there were more teams [than the Rangers] involved, would the return have been bigger? Yeah. But that’s not the situation we were in.”
Even beyond haggling over the returns, the human aspect of trading players is also difficult and unpleasant. The conversations with Kane in particular were “heavy,” Davidson said.
And this is a grueling point in the Hawks’ rebuild. The initial excitement created by plotting a path has faded; the growing excitement when that plan begins succeeding hasn’t yet arrived. The on-ice product is ugly, the path feels interminably long and the fan base is grumpy and cynical.
So perhaps it was good for Davidson that he could use Friday to reflect. And the conclusions that reflection time yielded are definitely good for him — and worth listening to from an outside perspective.
“I’ve experienced a lot of pretty big moments early in my career: coaching change, coaching search, trading a franchise legend, trading a lot of well-known fan-favorite players,” he said. “They’re not easy things, and there’s a lot of heat that comes with it at times. You learn a lot about yourself, about how dedicated and how much you believe in your plan and in your vision.
“I’ve learned that I am pretty steadfast in what I believe in, [about] what’s required to happen here to get to where we want to go. ... I’m a year [into my tenure and] I’m 34 years old; I’ve got a lot to learn. But I have a pretty strong opinion and strong belief in myself, in what we’re doing here and that we are on the right path.”
Notes
- Nikita Zaitsev finally received his U.S. visa and joined the Hawks for practice Friday. He said the process, which took 10 days, felt “like a year.”
- With reinforcements in town, Brett Seney, David Gust and Isaak Philips were all sent down to Rockford to aid their playoff push.
- Lukas Reichel and Joey Anderson were also sent down and then immediately recalled in “paper transactions” to make them eligible for the AHL playoffs. That used up two of the Hawks’ allotted four post-deadline non-emergency recalls. Cole Guttman, however, surprisingly wasn’t briefly sent down and thus won’t be eligible.
