Playoff run shows Blackhawks have pieces to build around but a long way to go

Just as quickly as the Blackhawks’ qualifying-round upset of the Oilers conjured dreams around Chicago of another Stanley Cup run, those well-meaning yet ultimately silly fantasies were shut down by a real Cup contender.

The Golden Knights didn’t cruise past the Hawks in any of their five games, but then again, that’s not their style. The Knights aren’t the NHL’s most exciting or explosive team — just arguably its deepest, its most structured, its smartest, its most thoroughly talented.

The Hawks, meanwhile, have talent in patches and the framework of what could be an effective system, but have many unfilled holes and at least one more season of experience away from putting it all together.

This postseason, as logistically strange as it was, certainly proved that.

Even Jonathan Toews, who has seen many a contender and pretender in his career to date, seemed to come to terms with that reality after the Hawks’ season-ending Game 5 loss Tuesday.

“[When] you miss the playoffs for a couple years in a row, you’re watching a lot of hockey late in the spring, and you kind of lose track of where you stand, because there’s no doubt it’s a different level from the regular season,” Toews said. “It was definitely good for us to get back to the playoffs and play some meaningful games.”

The Hawks’ regular season was a rollercoaster of climbs and descents, of discouraging losing streaks and thoughts of tanking quickly counterbalanced by promising stretches and thoughts of sneaking into the regular eight-team playoff field.

The Hawks turned out to be neither bad enough to tank, nor good enough to make the playoffs in any normal year.

And while a global pandemic and some wise ad-libbing by the NHL made this anything but a normal year, the playoffs only provided more conclusive support for that assessment.

The Hawks’ playoff run was more of a drop tower — straight up, then straight down — than a roller coaster. In the end, it left them right where they were before: waiting in line for the next ride.

“We just wanted to prolong it, go as long as we could,” coach Jeremy Colliton said. “Every moment in there was a positive. So that’s only going to help these guys.”

The Hawks’ old core can still hold up their end of the bargain: Duncan Keith and Toews were varying levels of good in the postseason, and Patrick Kane’s struggles can be excused by his 84-point regular season.

The Hawks’ young guns are impressive, too: Kirby Dach took a big step forward over the summer, Adam Boqvist remains ahead of the defenseman development curve and Dominik Kubalik broke out as a star over the last year.

Even oft-criticized Colliton improved his stock, with his vision for the team briefly realized and his comfort level behind an NHL bench increased.

Around those bright spots lingers a lot of dead weight, though.

The goaltending outlook is very murky, especially with Corey Crawford — despite his playoff heroics — a pending unrestricted free agent.

The defense has some talent but very little cohesion. The presence of solid players like Keith, Boqvist and Connor Murphy shouldn’t disguise the fact the Hawks allowed the most scoring chances in the league this season.

The bottom-six forward corps were subpar, too, even when Colliton demoted underperforming youngsters like Alex DeBrincat or Alex Nylander into them.

The Knights, with their well-rounded roster, exposed those flaws just as much as the equally flawed, top-heavy, overrated Oilers hid them.

But the playoff run was still a worthwhile gift to the Hawks by the league, providing one week of fun and a second week of valuable learning.

The revamped front office can use those postseason lessons — which provided far more clear-cut feedback than the regular season did — to form their plan for shaping the team moving forward.

And the players can use this reminder of what a real Cup contender looks like to set goals of eventually returning to that level.

“Ultimately, as a player, you see the standard that is there,” Keith said. “I feel like we’ve made a few strides this year, but we’re going to have to take the positives and try to build.”