NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jason Dickinson has cemented himself this season as a strong candidate to be the most interesting Blackhawk.
He’s an amateur carpenter in his spare time. He grew up, in a wild coincidence, in the same small Ontario town as MacKenzie Entwistle and Taylor Raddysh. He naturally builds chemistry with anyone who wears No. 24 — which was first Sam Lafferty, then Anders Bjork.
And in the wake of the Hawks’ flurry of earth-shaking trades leading up to the March 3 deadline, Dickinson offered some in-depth analyses that suggested a promising post-playing-career future as an NHL general manager.
“The [crappy] part about the business side is guys are going to move on,” Dickinson said Feb. 27. “Teams have to get picks. They have to start building for the future. ... It’s really the only way to build a team.”
Most active players insist they don’t care about draft picks. After all, draft picks aren’t actual men sitting beside them in the locker room and battling with them on the ice, at least at the moment.
But Dickinson, on the other hand, fully grasps their value. The fact Hawks GM Kyle Davidson has accumulated so many for the years ahead genuinely excites him, even if — with just one year left on his current contract — there’s no guarantee he’s around to see the process progress.
“I’m a very tactical mind,” Dickinson said. “I look at everything like a puzzle. They’re building their puzzle right now.
“All those draft picks are pieces of the puzzle that they’re going to turn into...something, whether it’s a pick that pans out or a pick that gets flipped for a player that’s ready to play in the NHL. The easiest way to build your team is to have assets. The teams that struggle are the teams that don’t have assets.”
During deadline season or whenever a big trade happens around the league, Dickinson will — just like any invested fan or reporter — pull up the contract- and pick-tracking website CapFriendly and evaluate the involved teams’ outlooks.
“I don’t memorize things, but when things happen, I’ll check in, look at the situation, see what’s going on, see where teams are at in that respect,” he said. “And then I’ll probably forget [by] the next month.”
That last comment seemed overly humble, considering he had — just seconds before — discussed the outlook of the Lightning, who own no picks higher than the sixth round this year.
“Tampa, in a few years, they might be sitting there struggling, because they don’t have assets,” he said. “But at that point, [if] they flip [Nikita] Kucherov, they flip [Andrei] Vasilevskiy and they flip [Brayden] Point, now they’ve got assets again to start building again.”
Retirement doesn’t seem remotely imminent for Dickinson, who will turn 28 in July. And when that day eventually does come, he wants to first give his wife a turn to pursue her own passions after years of bouncing around North America with him.
But if things worked out in such a way that made it possible, he admitted he would consider trying his hand at being a GM. Objectively, his intelligence, obvious hockey experience and ability to take a step back to look at the big picture all seem well-suited for the gig.
“Maybe, maybe,” he said. “I would try it out at the junior level first, before I get into the real meat of things.
“But I would love to have some fun with it, and try to take my perspective into things and see if it works. And maybe it doesn’t, and that [would also be] a good lesson to learn.”
