Blackhawks give failed prospects Nicolas Beaudin, Evan Barratt fresh starts

Kyle Davidson hasn’t hesitated throughout his short general manager tenure to give failed Blackhawks prospects opportunities for fresh starts elsewhere.

Wednesday represented the biggest wave of such moves yet. In two separate trades, the Hawks dealt Nicolas Beaudin to the Canadiens for forward Cameron Hillis and forward Evan Barratt to the Flyers for defenseman Cooper Zech. In a third transaction, Rockford sent forward Riley McKay to Laval, the Canadiens’ AHL affiliate.

The additions of Hillis, 22, and Zech, 23, will maintain some minor-league depth, but they’re largely irrelevant from an NHL perspective. Hillis has played mostly in the ECHL, while Zech has tallied 36 points in 131 AHL games over the past several years.

These moves were primarily intended to help out Beaudin and Barratt, even with little-to-no benefit to the Hawks. Tellingly, they’re both headed home: Beaudin hails from the Montreal suburb of Chateauguay, Quebec; Barratt grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Bristol, Pennsylvania, and played at Penn State.

They fall in the same category as Davidson’s trades last December that sent Malcolm Subban to the Sabres and Chad Krys to the Maple Leafs.

Wednesday marks a disappointing end to Beaudin’s tenure in particular. The 27th overall pick in 2018 — the Hawks’ second first-rounder that year after Adam Boqvist — had seemingly broken into the NHL during the pandemic-shortened 2021 season, but he fell completely out of favor after ex-GM Stan Bowman’s resignation last fall.

He’d spent last season and the first couple weeks of this season fighting for limited ice time on Rockford’s third defensive pairing.

“It has been hard sometimes,” Beaudin said in March. “We all want to be in the NHL. It’s not easy. The AHL is a tough league, a grinding league, so you’ve just got to keep going.”

Barratt, the Hawks’ third-round pick in 2017, had been decently productive for Rockford the past two seasons, recording 42 points in 90 games. But approaching his 24th birthday in February, his road to the NHL with the Hawks appeared difficult to plot out.

“I’ve got to look in the mirror and say, ‘You’re not that old. You need to relax a little bit,’ ” Barratt said in September. “I’ve got to realize I’m still very young, I’ve got a lot to learn and my time will come eventually.”