Andrew Shaw is that rare player who is annoying enough to drive an opponent out of his mind and skilled enough to score on him. He’s a headbanger who can read music. But he’s not irreplaceable, just as Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd, Patrick Sharp and Brandon Saad weren’t before him.
Year after year, the Blackhawks have found a way to carry on after salary cap squeezes, so it would be silly to think that the world is going to end because they traded Shaw to the Canadiens.
There has been some noise that this will be the season the cap finally does in the Hawks, who also traded Bryan Bickell and Teuvo Teravainen. But that ignores two things:
— General manager Stan Bowman has done a phenomenal job of remaking the roster after losing players due to cap issues. He has won three Stanley Cups since becoming GM in 2009, and after each one, he had to find new pieces for the puzzle.
— Almost all the players the Blackhawks have parted with became commodities, in part, because of the skill of teammates Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Marian Hossa, Duncan Keith and Corey Crawford. Let’s not lose sight of that. It’s a million times easier to build around a Stanley Cup core than it is to build a core.
The Hawks were good enough to win the Stanley Cup last season. History will show that they lost in the first round to the Blues, but it won’t show that it took two posts to keep a Brent Seabrook shot from going into the net and tying Game 7.
This is still a great team, and it still has Bowman running the show. More importantly, it still has Kane and Toews. Until otherwise notified, Chicago is a long way from being wiped off the map.
