Blackhawks enter NHL rental market with big trades out of the way

With the complicated moves out of the way, the Blackhawks will now move into the more straightforward rental market in the final days before the NHL trade deadline Friday.

General manager Kyle Davidson had his hands full the past few days while sorting out the intricacies of deals with the Maple Leafs and Rangers, sending Jake McCabe and Sam Lafferty to the former and Patrick Kane to the latter. Being in Pacific Time on the Hawks’ road trip didn’t make things any easier, either.

“I don’t think anything is like this,” Davidson said Tuesday after finalizing the Kane trade. “This is so unique. I’m early into my tenure as a GM, and I think this will be the first and last time I deal with something like this.”

By comparison, flipping pending-free-agent forwards Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou would be much simpler. There’s no guarantee either of them does get traded, but they are nonetheless the most likely among the remaining Hawks.

They’re both on identical one-year contracts — with $3 million salary-cap hits — that expire at season’s end, making them obvious “rentals.” They’re both represented by the same agent, Darren Ferris. They’re both good enough to draw interest but not so valuable that they’ll warrant big, complex return packages.

“[We’re] remaining open to any ideas that are thrown our way,” Davidson said. “We didn’t sign them just to be traded. We signed them because we liked them as players and we thought they could push a certain style of play, which they’ve done an excellent job at. [But] it’s a business, so we have to do our due diligence.”

Domi has been excellent lately, ripping off a seven-game point streak in which he tallied 14 total points and 25 shots on goal before the Hawks’ loss Tuesday against the Coyotes.

The center now touts 49 points in 60 games; he’s going to end up having the second-best season of his career. That makes him one of the most productive players left on the market.

He has so greatly exceeded expectations, in fact, that an extension — either now or in the summer, whether or not he’s traded this week — is a very real possibility. The Hawks will need players to fill out next year’s roster and hit the salary floor, and Domi has quickly become a well-liked leader.

“I’ve said from Day One that I love playing here, so we’ll see how it pans out,” he said in January.

Davidson did insist Monday he’s “not at all” concerned about hitting the floor next season, even though Hawks’ current contracts put them about $20 million short, so he clearly has some things planned.

Athanasiou, meanwhile, has roughly matched expectations this season, providing elite speed and moderate production. The winger touts 22 points, including 14 goals, in 59 games.

Domi is on his fifth team and Athanasiou his fourth, so the league has a pretty good idea of the players they are. The question thus becomes: What can the Hawks get in exchange?

The Capitals trading Lars Eller to the Avalanche on Wednesday was both bad (eliminating a possible suitor) and good (setting a high price precedent). The Capitals received a 2025 second-round pick for Eller, who has just 16 points this season but is stellar defensively.

Other rental-forward reference points include the Islanders acquiring Pierre Engvall (21 points) for a third-round pick, the Wild acquiring Marcus Johansson (28 points) for a third-round pick and the Golden Knights acquiring Ivan Barbashev (29 points, but 60 last year) for Zach Dean (a first-round pick two years ago).

All that suggests the Hawks could conceivably get at least a second-round pick for Domi and third- or fourth-round pick for Athanasiou. But that depends on finding interested trading partners and making such trades actually happen.