Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson wasn’t exaggerating when he said, mere minutes after his team won the NHL draft lottery Monday, that the No. 1 pick can change both a franchise and a city.
Just one day later — still 50 days before that pick will actually be made, presumably on phenom Connor Bedard — that change is already evident.
By Tuesday morning, 12 hours after the news broke, the Hawks had sold $5.2 million worth of new season-ticket packages — including 1,200 full-season packages.
Even with 20 sales representatives grinding away Monday night, the department proved unable to keep up with the tsunami of phone calls and online orders from a devoted fan base truly reinvigorated for the first time in years. Phones kept ringing; inboxes kept filling up.
The Hawks were already optimistic about attendance this past season and sales for next season, but that optimism was based on seriously lowered expectations from the dynasty era.
Now, four ping-pong balls popping up in the right order at the NHL’s New Jersey offices — the official winning combination, 4-5-9-13, just happened to be one of the 1,150 such combinations previously assigned to the Hawks — has blown those expectations out of the water.
The United Center will likely be full again for the majority of home games next season. After a couple years of heavily increased advertising for season-ticket memberships, the Hawks might have to consider capping memberships for this coming season in order to preserve some inventory for single-game ticket sales.
Beyond tickets, the side effects of the draft-lottery win will trickle into everything else business-related. There is a sense of renewed relevance and optimism around the Hawks over the past 24 hours that hasn’t existed in a while.
In the Blackhawks Store on Monday afternoon, the majority of jerseys on display were for players no longer on the team: Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. That’s going to change very soon.
Indeed, the unbelievably fortuitous timing of Bedard’s anticipated arrival coming mere months after those legends’ departures cannot be overlooked. Even prospect development camp at Fifth Third Arena in July — which normally draws a few hundred fans — will likely be overflowing with Chicagoans seeking a first glimpse of the city’s newest sports icon.
Sponsorships and corporate partnerships will likely expand significantly, as well, even if those take a little longer to fall into place. So will TV ratings and national visibility. With Bedard headlining the Hawks’ “new core” alongside Lukas Reichel, Kevin Korchinski, Frank Nazar, Alex Vlasic and others working their way up through the pipeline (or getting ready to be drafted), there’s suddenly quite a lot to promote.
Outside of Chicago, emotions are much different at the moment. Many fans were rooting first for their team to win the lottery and, second, for the Hawks to not win; they were dearly disappointed. The contrast between the team’s $5.2 million immediate profit and $2 million fine inflicted by the NHL in 2021 for their sexual-assault scandal handling has also been widely panned.
But the aforementioned ping-pong balls are neither rigged nor karmic. The Hawks simply received a minor miracle.
Ironically, had Andreas Athanasiou not forced overtime late in the season finale against the Flyers, or had Toews actually scored on his overtime breakaway minutes later, the Hawks would have finished 31st or 29th in the final standings and would not have won the lottery.
It turned out they needed that exact one point — the margins were that slim. And the shockwaves are this massive.
The Hawks most likely won’t be good next year, even if Davidson is more aggressive than previously planned this summer in order to assemble a competent forward lineup around Bedard. They will be interesting and full of hope, though, and that represents a big change from two days ago.
