Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson realized, when he decided in January to re-sign pending free agents Nick Foligno, Jason Dickinson and Petr Mrazek, that doing so would lead to a quiet trade-deadline week come March.
Those veteran players, after all, would have been the most appealing Hawks on the market.
As it turned out, Davidson’s week was even quieter than he anticipated. The NHL deadline passed Friday afternoon without the Hawks making a single trade on deadline day itself; their only move of the week involved dealing Anthony Beauvillier to the Predators for a fifth-round pick on Thursday.
“Heading into it, I thought there would be a little more activity, [although] whether we did something or not was a different story,” Davidson said Friday. “I wasn’t dead-set on trying to make other moves. If it happened, it happened, and it didn’t.”
This year’s mood — and Davidson’s phone bill — couldn’t have possibly been much different than the last two years, when he executed several high-profile trades (involving the likes of Patrick Kane and Brandon Hagel) as well as a barrage of small ones.
“The last two deadlines I’ve worked have been so busy that this felt different,” he added. “You’re thinking, ‘Is there something else I should be doing?’ ... To say it was much more quiet would be an understatement. It was different. You still work the phones the same, but there’s less substance in those phone calls, which feels like you’re spinning your wheels a bit.”
Colin Blackwell and Tyler Johnson — two pending free agents who weren’t extended earlier this season — were considered the most likely Hawks to move, but demand for depth forwards never seemed to materialize much around the league.
The Coyotes received only a sixth-round pick from the Predators for Jason Zucker, who is fairly comparable to Johnson in terms of age, production and oversized salary-cap hit. And the Blue Jackets received only a fourth-round pick from the Rangers for Jack Roslovic, who is four years younger than Blackwell and has been significantly more productive this season.
"[The returns] felt more unpredictable this year, just seeing some of the different deals around the league,” Davidson said. “It seemed like there were fewer [picks exchanged] in that mid-range — that two-, three-, four-round range.”
Blackwell and Johnson will end up sticking on the Hawks for the final 19 games of the season and then likely parting ways this summer. Particularly for Blackwell, who hoped for his pregnant wife’s sake to at least not have to move twice in 2024, it’s surely a relief.
It also seemed possible, if not likely, that the Hawks could weaponize their abundant cap space to take on another team’s bad contract or help retain salary in a complicated trade.
But there weren’t really any bad contracts dumped this week, and although Davidson said he did receive some salary retention interest, he didn’t believe the late-round picks he was offered in exchange were valuable enough to commit one of his two available salary-retention slots (with one slot already occupied by Jake McCabe).
That was probably a miscalculation based on an assumption there would be more lucrative retention opportunities Friday, which didn’t prove to be the case. The Flyers, for example, got a fifth-round pick from the Golden Knights on Wednesday for retaining 25% of Noah Hanifin’s cap hit just through the remainder of this season, during which time the Hawks’ two available slots will go unused. But the Hawks have plenty of picks already and the future can be difficult to predict in this league, so it’s a miscalculation worth forgiving.
Interestingly, first-round picks were also exchanged less frequently this year than usual, not that the Hawks ever harbored hopes of getting another one of those. Only four guaranteed first-rounders moved during deadline week and Jake Guentzel, this year’s most discussed trade target, didn’t even fetch one of them. The Penguins will only receive a first-rounder for him if the Hurricanes advance to the Stanley Cup Final.
But from the Hawks’ perspective, there was one blockbuster deal of some relevance: the Sharks and Knights’ last-second trade of Tomas Hertl for a package of three picks and a prospect.
The Sharks further gutted their already terrible roster this week by dealing away Hertl and Anthony Duclair — two of their top three goal-scorers this season — as well as Kaapo Kahkonen, who formed half their goalie tandem. Their roster is now clearly worse than the Hawks’, a fact that could make the difference in the race for last place since the two teams are currently tied for last at 37 points each.
The Hawks did lose depth forward Boris Katchouk to a waiver claim by the Senators. Katchouk finishes his Chicago tenure having tallied 26 points in 117 games, including nine points in 38 games this season. The Hawks probably weren’t going to re-sign him this summer regardless.
“At times, [Boris] gave us some big boosts,” coach Luke Richardson said. “I don’t think it was consistent, but I don’t think anybody on our team has been that way this year. This is a great opportunity for him [in Ottawa].”
Beauvillier and Katchouk’s departures clear NHL forward roster spots for Andreas Athanasiou, who will return from his nearly season-long groin injury Saturday against the Capitals, and Landon Slaggert, whose senior season at Notre Dame could end as soon as this weekend.
The professional debuts of Slaggert and Frank Nazar, who seems more likely than not to sign once his sophomore season at Michigan ends, are arguably the two biggest things worth looking forward to during this season’s stretch run.
Meanwhile, young defensemen Isaak Phillips and Louis Crevier were sent down to Rockford since veteran defenseman Nikita Zaitsev is also expected to return to the Hawks’ lineup Saturday, which would’ve bumped them into healthy-scratch territory.
Davidson’s attention now turns toward the future. He must not only prepare for negotiations with Slaggert, Nazar, other prospects and the Hawks’ class of restricted free agents (headlined by Alex Vlasic and Lukas Reichel) but also finalize the Hawks’ scouting and ranking of 2024 draft-eligible prospects and begin sketching out a rough plan for the offseason ahead.
