What If This God Damn Disaster Of A Season Was The Plan All Along?
I want you to imagine that it’s a summer day and you decide to go for a dip in the pool. You slide in nice and easy and decide you’re going to be productive. Instead of grabbing a noodle floating around working on your tan, you’re going do some cardio and work on your body. You can’t swim laps though. The pool is too crowded and honestly you’re getting over an ear infection. You don’t want this to be a lingering issue all summer so you just tread water in the deep end. Get toned. Things are going nice and easy at first but then about 40 seconds go by and you know you’re in trouble. You’re winded. You’ve heard that swimming works every muscle in the body, but boyyy did you not take it seriously. You’re now struggling to keep your head above water and then you just decide you need a break and down you go. Floating peacefully down to the bottom of the pool until your feet touch and get that good push off and spring back to the surface. The alternative to that plan is just to stuggle, exhaust yourself, keep fighting and grasping for air until you eventually drown for good.
Maybe this is how the Blackhawks looked at this season all along. Maybe they realized the quickest way back to the top was to hit bottom and spring board themselves to the top again. This season, in hindsight, was clearly a rebuilding year. I don’t think the plan was to ever miss the playoffs, but last summer the Blackhawks took a look at their roster, the Cap, and the landscape of the division and decided to get younger and have some cap predictability. Well both of those things happened. Saad and Murphy, while both have been disappointing this year, have their future salaries penciled in while Hjalmarsson and Panarin would both need new and expensive contracts. That’d be a problem when you also have to sign a whole mess of RFAs starting with Nick Schmaltz at the same time. The Hawks also got younger in a hurry. DeBrincat, Hinostroza, Schmaltz, Sikura, Kampf, Saad, and Hayden are all 25 and under. You could make an arguement that with Saad returning to a more normal level of play and the continued development of the other young players the Blackhawks have enough talent at forward to be a contender.
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The problem is the defense. The Blackhawks haven’t drafted an impact defenseman since Nik Hjalmarsson in 2005. The Blackhawks got lucky, in a sense, that they were able to draft and develop a Norris Trophy caliber defenseman in the 2nd round because you know what…it’s REALLY fucking hard to find true No.1 type defensemen. You look at the best around the league…Doughty, Hedman, Karlsson, Ekblad, Pietrangelo, Seth Jones, Werenski, Ellis…those guys were all high draft picks.
And maybe if you realize that the season is lost because the defense is bad and Crawford is out then you change course. Joel Quenneville is a smart man. You don’t win 3 Cups and nearly 900 games by being a dummy. There are things the Blackhawks could’ve done structurally to give themselves a better chance. If your goalies stink and your D are turnover prone then you can’t win playing a high chance game everynight. A track meet is a recipe for disaster if you don’t have a top notch goalie. And yet…
**graph courtesy of Sean Tierney @chartinghockey
And yet the Blackhawks used this track meet style. It’s a system that has obviously been great for the Blackhawks when they have the right pieces to run it. Which was CLEARLY not the case this year. The coaching staff made zero changes. Perhaps they didn’t make any changes because they felt it was better to coach up young players to learn a system so they can have long-term success rather than completely abandon their system in order to fight and claw to make the post-season and lose in the first round. That’s just speculation on my part, but it would be a reasonable thought process by the staff and organization.
The Blackhawks are now trying to emmulate, while maybe not intentionally back in the summer, the rebuild plan the Bruins executed. If you go back to starting in the 2014 NHL Draft the Bruins were able to COMPLETELY re-tool their team and get back to being Cup contenders by nailing the draft process.
Bruins 2014 NHL Draft: 3 NHL regulars. Pastrnak is a bonafide star, while Heinen and Donato look like they’ll be contributors in the top 9 for years.
Bruins 2015 NHL Draft: 2 NHL regulars. Brandon Carlo is a big part of their D playing 20 minutes a night and DeBrusk already figures in the Bruins top 6 as a winger in his rookie year
Bruins 2016 NHL Draft: Charlie Fookin McAvoy. Chuckie Bright Lights. The Bruins found a real Norris type defenseman.
The Blackhawks in that time frame have found themselves some dynamic forwards like Schmaltz, DeBrincat, and now Sikura coming. They haven’t yet found that impact Dmen. Not yet anyways. Jokijarju, Mitchell, Krys, Gilbert, Hillman and Carlsson all look promising, but it’s unlikely one of them will be a Norris Defenseman. That makes this draft the most important draft the Blackhawks have had since drafting Patrick Kane in 2007. The Blackhawks are guaranteed a top 10 pick for the first time since that 2008 draft and they’ll also have a late first round pick. If the Blackhawks are going to spring from the bottom of the pool then Stan Bowman and his scouting staff MUST find their impact defenseman in THIS draft. Some say that time is already out on the Blackhawks when it comes to Cup contention. I say this is their last best chance.
It’s a deep draft for defensemen. Dahlin will go No.1, but after that the Blackhawks have a realistic shot of landing Bouchard, Hughes, Dobson, and Miller. The Blackhawks need this draft to be a homerun. They need these kids to help them win big by 2020. If they strike out then the run truly is over and Bowman will be fired. No pressure or anything though.