General manager Kyle Davidson traveled with the Blackhawks on their trip to Florida, taking advantage of a few sunny days now that his ‘‘phone has settled down’’ after the trade deadline.
But upon returning to Chicago, with a stretch of five consecutive home games starting Sunday against the Coyotes, Davidson said he planned to begin working on rebuilding the Hawks’ front office.
‘‘[We’ll] really start road-mapping, white-boarding it out,’’ he said Friday in Tampa. ‘‘[We’ll start] just bouncing ideas around and maybe talking about structures and different departments and builds we want to look at.’’
So far, Davidson’s only front-office changes have been high-level personnel switches. He parted ways with longtime amateur scouting director Mark Kelley and longtime assistant GM Ryan Stewart but brought back former executive Norm Maciver as associate GM overseeing scouting and elevated former Hawks defenseman Brian Campbell into a yet-to-be-titled role.
Davidson said officially designating Campbell’s role hasn’t been a ‘‘hot-button topic’’ because Campbell ‘‘knows he’ll be involved.’’
On the Maciver front, Davidson said he understood the criticism about bringing in a man with extensive history with the Hawks. Objectively, Maciver is the opposite of an outsider. But Davidson again distanced himself and Maciver from previous GM Stan Bowman’s approach.
‘‘While we’ve been here a long time, we have very different opinions on how we would like to do things and how things have been done in the past,’’ Davidson said.
Maciver was brought in partly because of the pre-existing trust and familiarity he and Davidson have with each other. During the chaos leading up to the trade deadline, there wasn’t time to conduct a thorough search. And Maciver’s personality is such that he’ll ‘‘say basically whatever the heck he wants’’ and tell Davidson if he’s ‘‘barking up the wrong tree.’’
Now that Davidson finally has some time on his hands, however, he needs to make quite a few new hires to flesh out all areas of the front office, even if most of those newcomers will slot into less prominent roles.
Indeed, the front office not only needs significantly more people from a manpower standpoint but also a significantly wider range of voices. The latter aspect will be a priority.
‘‘Norm is just going to be one person in this much larger build that’s going to involve many different perspectives, many of which will be completely new to the Blackhawks and maybe hockey, as well,’’ Davidson said.
The analytics department Davidson created last summer is one area especially likely to get an influx of hires.
Prospect plans
The Hawks haven’t yet used any of their four allotted non-emergency American Hockey League call-ups after the trade deadline, but Davidson said one definitely will be used on top prospect Lukas Reichel at some point this month.
That brings up the issue of Reichel’s entry-level contract because five more NHL appearances this season will burn the first of his three years. Davidson once again insisted he isn’t bothered by that.
‘‘You can’t really game-plan it that much,’’ he said. ‘‘If he gets 10 games, that’s fine. I’m not too concerned with it, to be honest. Once we’re looking at really spending to that [salary] cap and utilizing every dollar, he’s probably going to be in a different contract anyway, out of his entry-level [deal]. If we burn it, we burn it.’’
Meanwhile, prospect defenseman Alex Vlasic — who played only seven minutes Friday against the Lightning after being a healthy scratch in five consecutive games — might be sent down fairly soon.
‘‘The plan is to get him a couple of more games, get him some more experience,’’ Davidson said. ‘‘That’s going to give him great insight into what he needs to work on.
‘‘And then at some point . . . we’ll get him playing some games with the [Rockford] IceHogs, too.’’
