VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The Blackhawks wanted, intended and were built to be better this season.
And they are indeed more competitive. Excluding empty-net goals, they’ve been blown out only once through their first 17 games, and eight of their 11 losses have been by one goal.
But are the 6-10-1 Hawks actually better, especially when compared to the rest of the league? The jury is still out on that.
As of Friday, they sit one point out of a tie for last place in the NHL and six points out of a playoff spot. The league-wide floor seems higher this season than most — the Canadiens’ not-that-awful 5-10-2 record is the league’s worst — so the bottom tier isn’t as clearly defined.
The past few weeks in particular, the Hawks have looked alarmingly similar to the outmatched teams of recent years past. In six games since the start of November, their 36.7% expected-goals ratio during five-on-five play ranks 31st in the NHL, ahead of only the Sharks.
They’ll enter their Saturday matchup against the Canucks, the one team that has already blown them out, having scored just one regulation goal in four consecutive games. The outlook isn’t rosy.
If the Hawks fail to escape the NHL’s basement this season, though, there will be one silver lining: That would put them in position for another top-five draft pick.
General manager Kyle Davidson owed it to fans to try to give them a more watchable product this season, so the Hawks couldn’t reasonably tank intentionally again. Privately, however, he might not be terribly heartbroken — at least from a long-term planning perspective — if the outcome winds up being comparable to the last two tank seasons.
That would certainly give Davidson a golden opportunity to address the one remaining hole in the Hawks’ prospect pool: a second elite forward to complement Connor Bedard down the road.
Davidson has claimed he’s “comfortable” with the state of the pool as it stands, with the caveat that he’s “not saying we’ve got this all figured out.” Nonetheless, by trying to trade for the Blue Jackets’ fourth overall pick on the draft floor last June with the idea of selecting Ivan Demidov, Davidson signaled he knows that’s something the Hawks need — or at least would benefit significantly from having.
That trade falling through meant the Hawks kept their first-round pick in next summer’s draft, and Davidson will likely target a forward with that pick no matter what.
It landing in the top five, though, would give him a chance to draft not just any forward but one of the semi-consensus top four forwards: James Hagens, Porter Martone, Michael Misa and Roger McQueen.
Entering the season, a small but tuned-in portion of the Hawks’ fan base was actually rooting for that to happen — worrying that Davidson was pulling the Hawks out of the tanking stage prematurely in order to satisfy the masses — and more fans are gradually joining them as the season progresses.
Before the Canadiens the last three years, the most recent franchise to draft in the top five in three consecutive years was the Oilers from 2014 to 2016 — a stretch that yielded two superstars (Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl) and one bust (Jesse Puljujarvi).
The Hawks will hope that neither Bedard, Artyom Levshunov nor their top 2025 pick turns out to be a bust. On the other hand, it’s precisely a Draisaitl-type player that they would love to have next to Bedard.
Failing to escape the NHL’s basement this season wouldn’t be exclusively a good thing, though.
Tyler Bertuzzi and Teuvo Teravainen’s lack of major impact during the first month of their respective four- and three-year contracts is concerning, as is coach Luke Richardson’s indecisiveness with the depth chart and inability so far to find a set of four lines that click.
