Kyle Davidson’s Crucial To-Do List as Blackhawks GM
It was a long, circuitous route, played out over several months but, in the end, the Chicago Blackhawks walked in a circle and hired their new GM from within. As first reported by Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli Monday, the Hawks have officially promoted interim GM Kyle Davidson to permanent GM. He had held the temporary title since Oct. 26, 2021 after longtime GM Stan Bowman resigned in the wake of his role in covering up video coach Brad Aldrich’s alleged sexual assault on Kyle Beach in 2010.
Davidson had served Chicago’s assistant GM since 2019 after rising through the franchise’s front office over the course of a decade. During his interim period as GM, he already made one significant decision, firing coach Jeremy Colliton and replacing him with Derek King as interim bench boss in November. Under King, the Hawks have compiled an 18-18-6 record to date and shown some modest improvement on the defensive side while their offense has cratered.
Sorting out coaching was just one item on Davidson’s to-do list, of course. He has a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time going forward. The trade deadline is less than three weeks away. What are the crucial items on Davidson’s projected to-do list? Here’s a breakdown.
1. MAKING A MARC-ANDRE FLEURY TRADE WORK
First off: a reminder that Fleury holds the cards here. His contract, set to expire at the end of this season, carries a 10-team no-trade list. More importantly, he and the Hawks have a mutual agreement that he won’t be dealt unless he wants to be. He obviously hasn’t grown long-term roots in Chicago, having been traded there just last summer, but it’s not a certainty that he wants to leave.
Suitors might try to change his mind, though. It happens to be a season in which many teams are chewing their nails over goaltending woes, from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Edmonton Oilers to the Washington Capitals, and there’s no trading chip more powerful on the goaltending side than Fleury right now. With multiple Stanley Cup rings, a Vezina Trophy and the third-highest win total in NHL history to his name, Fleury should easily command a first-round pick and more as a game-changing rental piece. Not cashing him in would hold back Chicago’s ability to retool.
2. TRADING CALVIN DE HAAN
We saw what a player like David Savard meant to the eventual-champion Tampa Bay Lightning at last year’s deadline. Every contender needs physical middle-pair-caliber blueliners who sacrifice their bodies, and de Haan, a pending UFA carrying a $4.55-million cap hit, fits the bill. His selfless style gets him nicked up often but, when healthy, he’s a piece that would solidify the left side of a contender’s blueline. His style of play tends to translate better to the post-season, too, when the game gets more physical and the whistles stay in officials’ pockets longer.
Trading Savard to Tampa netted the Columbus Blue Jackets a first-round pick last year. Savard was a coveted right shot and carried a slightly stronger reputation, so it’s doubtful de Haan extracts a first-rounder in a trade, but a second-rounder might be a fair ask on Davidson’s part.
3. CONVINCING PATRICK KANE THE SHIP ISN’T SHINKING
During an interview I did with Bowman before the 2020-21 season, he claimed his veteran players, including Kane, didn’t have to stress over a rebuild because “the rebuild had already begun.” Since that statement, the Hawks have missed the playoffs and are on track to do so again. Kane, one of the franchise’s all-time greats, enters the final year of his contract along with fellow $10.5-million man Jonathan Toews next season.
It would surprise no one if Kane and Toews sign extensions and play their entire careers in Chicago. On the other hand, if you exclude the bogus play-in berth in the 2020 bubble tournament, the Hawks are about to miss the playoffs a fifth straight season. Does Kane, one of the sport’s best-ever clutch players, really want to go half a decade or more without competing in the post-season? The Hawks hope they can grow something exciting around left winger Alex DeBrincat, blueliner Seth Jones and center Kirby Dach but, if Kane doesn’t sign an extension this summer and the team starts to drift out of the playoff picture a year from now, Kane will become an unbelievably popular name in trade scuttlebutt.
4. SORTING OUT THE FUTURE FOR KIRBY DACH, DOMINIK KUBALIK AND DYLAN STROME
Each of these key RFA forwards is confounding in a different way. Dach, the third-overall pick in the 2019 draft, has struggled to get his carer off the ground, battling horrible injury luck and confidence woes. Kubalik had established himself as one of the game’s most underrated goal-scorers before vanishing this season. Strome produces in fits and starts and has seemingly spent his entire career living in trade-rumor mills.
Davidson has tough decisions to make when considering their next contracts. Dach and Kubalik have likely played their way into bridge-deal territory but could represent buy-low opportunities should Davidson want to lock them in at affordable AAVs for longer. Dach, a big, rangy center, has struggled to experience any kind of continuity across his first three NHL seasons thanks to the pandemic, a major wrist injury sustained at the 2021 world juniors and the slew of front-office departures that followed the Beach scandal. Still only 21, Dach has plenty of potential to find himself. Kubalik, meanwhile, can blame some of his struggles in 2021-22 on poor puck luck. He’s converted just 8.8 percent of his shots this season after scoring on 15 percent over his first two campaigns. He’s much better than what he’s shown this season.
As for Strome, for every hot streak there’s a prolonged slump, and he’s the least likely of the RFAs to figure into Chicago’s long-term plans. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him dealt before the March-21 deadline.
5. FORTIFY THE FARM SYSTEM
Typically, a team mired in mediocrity for five years assembles a nice war chest of young talent, but that hasn’t been the case for Chicago. The light hasn’t switched on for Dach yet, while Adam Boqvist, the team’s 2018 first-rounder, was sacrificed in the Jones trade along with Chicago’s first rounder in last year’s draft and this year’s draft.
The Hawks’ current prospect pipeline includes a promising scorer in left winger Lukas Reichel, but it’s mostly pretty barren. Puck-moving defenseman Nicolas Beaudin, Chicago’s other 2018 first-round pick, is 22 now and has yet to establish himself as a full-time NHLer. The Blackhawks need long-term help at pretty much every position and are not set up to harvest it given they don’t own a pick until Round 2 of this July’s draft. It’s thus imperative for Davidson to claw back some draft capital via whichever trades he makes in the next couple weeks.
6. ESTABLISH A CULTURE OF TRUST
This final point is the toughest to achieve but the most important. The Beach scandal outed Chicago as a franchise that, to be blunt, prioritized winning over its players’ well-being. Changing the culture to establish trust between the players and front office isn’t all up to Davidson by any means, but he can certainly help. As Sheldon Kennedy and Wayne McNeil, co-founders of Respect Group inc. recently explained to me, sports franchises have the tendency to not view themselves as workplaces. As a result, they don’t establish the proper practices to ensure every employee feels safe. But athletes are in fact employees. The sooner a franchise like the Blackhawks understands that, the sooner it can improve its team culture.