For the last week or so, we’ve been talking about a lot of offseason thoughts from around the NHL interwebs about the moves that have (and haven’t) been made thus far in the summer. The universal sentiment around the Blackhawks is that they are going to be way better than they were last year — but still not very good.
A reminder we’ve consistently received is that a 30-point increase in the standings from one year to the next is enormous. And, if the Blackhawks do that, they’ll still probably be 15-20 points out of the playoffs.
All of that cold water getting poured on our collective enthusiasm can be a little underwhelming. But when I read the NHL staff predictions from The Athletic on Thursday morning, I was expecting some of the same low expectations.
I was pleasantly surprised with a few areas where the Blackhawks did — and did not — show up in their staff predictions. So let’s have a little optimism on a Thursday, eh?
Here’s the first place I saw a Blackhawks logo in the story:
So that’s kinda fun, isn’t it? Well, until Sean Gentile writes: “I can’t come close to talking myself into the Kraken, Blue Jackets or Blackhawks, even as a bit.” But hey, at those odds, why not throw a dollar on it and see what happens?
The next place where I got a little optimism for the Blackhawks was where I didn’t see them listed.
It’s been a minute since the Blackhawks weren’t in this mix. So that’s nice. It sucks for the fans in Columbus and Ottawa, who are hoping to turn a corner at some point. And Montreal is just… yeah.
I’m not going to put screen grabs of the next two areas where the Blackhawks showed up, but they speak perfectly to the issue so many have with figuring out what to make of the situation in Chicago as we move forward after two awful seasons. Head coach Luke Richardson showed up in the both the Jack Adams winner predictions (3.1%) and the first head coach to get fired list (9.4%).
When the Blackhawks hired Richardson two summers ago, everyone involved was incredibly transparent that this was going to be a long haul with a steep learning curve. They hadn’t hit bottom yet, which meant a couple long, hard years before the ship started heading in the right direction again.
This year, the Blackhawks come into a season with expectations of improvement for the first time with Richardson as the head coach.
When the Blackhawks brought in Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou on one-year deals as they entered the final season of the contracts of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, the plan was to stockpile assets at the trade deadline — not make the playoffs. And the Blackhawks successfully did precisely that with trades of Domi, Kane and others.
The following season was the bottom — even though the Blackhawks won the draft lottery and landed Connor Bedard. Injuries played a huge role in the piling up of the losses, but the roster was not built to be great before everyone got hurt. Now, we’ve seen what Bedard can do for most of an NHL season as a teenager and the front office has chosen to surround him with competent veterans while also affording the first significant wave of prospects adequate time to appropriately develop in Rockford.
I still think it’s an incredibly long shot the Blackhawks move on from Richardson; I think it would be a mistake and firmly believe he can take the team up the standings in the coming years.
