Patrick Kane hasn’t yet decided whether he’ll request or accept a trade away from the Blackhawks. He still plans to wait closer to the NHL’s March 3 trade deadline before making a firm decision.
But he is aware a few teams have reached out to his agent, Pat Brisson, to express interest. And he’s clearly not opposed to them doing so.
“We’ll figure out what team could be the best fit, but...it’s tough to decide if we’re getting to that point yet,” Kane said Monday. “There are definitely opportunities out there that are intriguing and could be exciting. We’ll see.”
One potential obstacle is Kane’s lingering lower-body injury. Various reports around the league have suggested some contenders are leery about it slowing him down. But Kane doesn’t share those concerns.
“When I get on the ice, it’s not like you’re thinking about anything else other than playing as well as you can,” he said. “That’s not something for me to worry about. [I’ll] just go about it the best I can.”
Kane has talked to Duncan Keith, who spent his final season with the Oilers after 16 with the Hawks, to get his perspective on the situation. Keith told Kane he’s “happy he got to experience being in a different organization” before he retired.
Kane has not yet talked to Hawks general manager Kyle Davidson, however, although he’s sure they’ll “at some point catch up.”
They most certainly will. On the other side of the aisle — within the front office — Davidson and everyone else are having “constant conversations” to plan for “every potential scenario, large to small,” CEO Danny Wirtz said.
Calls about possible trades spiked briefly after the Islanders and Canucks’ Bo Horvat blockbuster last week, coach Luke Richardson said, but have since quieted again.
The Hawks are nonetheless anticipating eventually moving some veterans out — whether or not Kane and Jonathan Toews are included in that exodus — to make room for their ready-to-graduate prospects in Rockford.
(Toews’ situation is no less confusing, after all. On Tuesday against the Ducks, he’ll miss a game due to illness for the third time in two months and second time in two weeks.)
“Everybody knows our plan moving forward is we have lots of young guys coming but they’re not here or maybe not ready yet,” Richardson said. “If there’s good hockey deals to be had that are going to help us to the next stage...they have a good plan.”
In the Hawks’ business and marketing branches, meanwhile, the outcome of the two trade sagas will also have major repercussions.
Tuesday marks the fifth-to-last home game before the deadline, with nine scheduled after it. They’ll host the Stars the last day before the deadline (March 2) and the Predators the first day after.
“How [Kane and Toews are] treated throughout the process, that’s going to be important to us,” business president Jaime Faulkner said. “They’re still on our team today; they’re still contributing in big ways. How do we continue to honor that with our fanbase?
“If they make decisions to leave, if things happen down the road, how do we make sure our fans get to say thank you, get to say goodbye? [How do we] celebrate if they stay? We need to be prepared for that. We’re trying to be as gracious as possible. They are the Blackhawks’ identity right now.”
If trades happen, the Hawks would need to “communicate very quickly” with fans to explain the decisions, Faulkner said.
They might need to hastily organize welcome-back ceremonies if the trades are with teams scheduled to visit the United Center before season’s end. And conversely, they might also need to make ticket-price adjustments to maintain steady attendance without their two biggest stars.
