There’s a reason professional sports franchises tank, despite whatever preventative measures their leagues bake in to discourage it, and the reason is simple: It still works.
For the Blackhawks, in fact, it couldn’t have worked any better — and it worked in spite of the players screwing up, winning Game 82 and decreasing their odds in the process. The lottery balls don’t lie. Now, they’ve got Connor Bedard in town to sell jerseys and ticket packages and, at some point soon, play an actual game.
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The only Blackhawks question that mattered ahead of last season — “Will losing games on purpose actually pay off?” — has been answered. Now, it’s time to see where they go next and what Bedard actually brings to the table.
The projection
New dynasties aren’t built overnight, even if your team just landed the most exciting young phenom in almost a decade.
Sidney Crosby’s Penguins were awful in his rookie year finishing second last with 58 points. Connor McDavid’s Oilers were awful in his rookie year finishing second last with 70 points. Expect more of the same for Connor Bedard’s Blackhawks who project to finish third last with a very high probability of landing in the league’s bottom five.
Look around the league and that’s for the best. The consistent contenders have multiple franchise players, not just one. Crosby has always had Evgeni Malkin and McDavid has always had Leon Draisaitl. Bedard needs his own franchise-level buddy and that likely only happens with another tragic finish near the bottom.
The ascent towards relevance begins next season, or the year after. This season is all about getting Bedard on his own franchise-level track while being bad enough to find someone in the 2024 draft to compliment him on that level.
Lucky for Chicago, the Blackhawks are on the right path to do exactly that as the stench from last season’s rotten team still lingers. They made some additions to support Bedard, but this is still an awful team that has a very good shot at finishing in the league’s basement once again.
Percentiles with the bar graphs are based on each player’s Offensive, Defensive and Net Rating relative to their time-on-ice slot, i.e. the first forward is compared to other first forwards only.
The strengths
For a team so bad it got Connor Bedard last season, strengths are difficult to come by. Bedard will obviously be the team’s brightest beacon this season, but even his status as an actual “strength” isn’t set in stone. In Year One, with this supporting cast, it’s not unreasonable to believe Bedard struggles to reach full flight from the jump.
We have high hopes though after seeing what previous generational talents did in their rookie season and that’s why Bedard starts the year with a projected plus-12 Net Rating. That’s off the strength of a projected point-per-game season and not far off the average value of other top forwards around the league at plus-14. A little bit below average, but damn impressive for an 18-year-old. His junior numbers were that good.
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He’s not the only blue-chip prospect slated to make an impact next season either.
Chicago’s top pick from last season, Kevin Korchinski who was selected seventh, has a strong chance to make the team and could be a much-needed talent injection on the backend. His production in junior was off-the-charts good (73 points in 54 games) and according to our Corey Pronman, he has top-pair upside as a smooth-skating, puck-moving offensive dynamo. It’s unlikely he realizes that in Year One, but at the very least he should drastically help Chicago find offense from a very weak blue line.
Lukas Reichel, the 17th pick in 2020, making the team full-time offers a boost as well. He carries serious potential after lighting up the AHL in back-to-back years and earning 15 points in 23 NHL games last season. His relative five-on-five numbers looked promising last year too and though he falls short of what’s expected of his role, it’s to the same degree as Bedard. The upside to live up to the hype is there.
Those are the three obvious bright spots, but the fact that they might be genuine strengths relative to their lineup role is very encouraging. Especially at their age.
Bedard and Reichel probably aren’t there yet, but we’ll throw the Blackhawks a bone given they don’t have a lot of players capable of exceeding the expectations of their role. Still, there are some other silver linings here and there.
Taylor Raddysh and Cole Guttman are solid depth pieces, as are the two $4 million men Corey Perry and Nick Foligno on the fourth line who provide a serious defensive boost. The forward group is still bad, but not nearly as barren as last season.
On defense, 22-year-old Alex Vlasic has flashed some shutdown potential in 21 career games. The 6’6” behemoth could form an intriguing shutdown pair with Connor Murphy this season and is one reason Chicago doesn’t look totally hopeless defensively for once.
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The weaknesses
Chicago does look pretty damn hopeless offensively though, projecting to land as the league’s third-worst offense. That lowers the Blackhawks’ overall watchability, especially whenever Bedard is on the bench. The lack of offensive support is staggering albeit unsurprising given where this team landed last season.
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Blackhawks' big question: Does Connor Bedard have enough help to have a successful season?
Potentially having Philipp Kurashev in the top six is a symptom of that. The 23-year-old somehow averaged over 17 minutes last season and may have been the league’s most ineffective top-six forward. At the NHL level, he can’t score, can’t pass, can’t move the puck up ice, can’t drive play, can’t defend and is one of just two forwards in a top-six role with a Net Rating below minus-five. The other is Ryan Strome who at least has some history of performing at that level. Kurashev doesn’t — he looks a lot closer to a fourth liner.
Maybe that changes and he breaks out, but for now, his elevated role is a red flag for Chicago’s offense. The same goes for Tyler Johnson (or Andreas Athanasiou) who also projects to be one of the league’s worst players used in a top-six role. The average top six provides 37 goals of value — Chicago is only at plus-nine, one of the worst marks in the league.
The Blackhawks added some pieces to help, but it just wasn’t enough.
The big addition was obviously Taylor Hall who is still a quality player, just not a quality second-in-command forward. Maybe he gets back to that in a return to a bigger role, it’s just not the likeliest scenario at his age. He’s at least expected to pace for over 50 points, joining Bedard and Reichel as the only Blackhawks players to do so. Only one other team, Montreal, is that short on weapons where the league average is 5.5 players. In other words, don’t expect Chicago to leave the league’s bottom five power plays.
A lack of oomph is the problem and if Ryan Donato is a team’s fourth-best weapon they’re in serious trouble. To his credit he’s a sneaky efficient scorer with 1.07 goals-per-60 over the last two seasons with Seattle — tied with Mark Scheifele and Timo Meier thank you very much. But there’s a reason he’s always on a third or fourth line and he’ll likely be overmatched in Chicago’s top six.
That problem extends to the blue line where Seth Jones grades out as a very weak number-one defenseman at both ends of the ice. The Model is definitely too sour on Jones — he was bumped into our Top 125 players list by insiders for a reason — and probably doesn’t give enough credit for just how difficult his situation was last season. But he still has two straight seasons hovering around 46 percent of the expected goals and 40 percent of the actual goals with Chicago. Last season saw his best relative impact on expected goals for his career, but that’s not saying a whole lot being compared to one of the worst teams of the analytics era.
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Maybe all that finally changes now that the Blackhawks have added some talent up front, it’s just a bit dubious that Jones can be The Guy at the top of a playoff-caliber blue line. He’s not the reason Chicago has tanked the last two seasons, but not being able to handle a role many expected him to excel in is part of the problem here. Bad teams are bad not only because of their bad players, but also because their good players don’t stack up favorably to the good players on good teams.
Of course for a team this weak it’s not just Jones that’s a problem on the back end — practically every player is slotted higher than he should be. Vlasic and Murphy have shutdown potential, but a serious lack of offensive punch makes them both relatively weak top-four options.
The worst offender is Nikita Zaitsev who miraculously is in the final year of his seven-year, $4.5 million contract. That he’s here might actually be a blessing in disguise for a Chicago team that could still use another blue-chip prospect at the end of this season; he’s projected to be a bottom-five defenseman in the league. Zaitsev is shockingly decent at retrieving pucks, but according to data tracked by Corey Sznajder, you may not find a player with fewer tools than Zaitsev. He’s abysmal at anything involving the puck on his stick and struggles to defend the rush. Last year was a new low for him where his teams were 0.73 expected goals-per-60 better with him on the bench. Among defenders that was the lowest mark in the league by a full 0.15 expected goals and the fifth worst in the analytics era. His Net Rating last year was minus-7.8 — in just 46 games.
Chicago’s lack of talent is a problem at every position where the Blackhawks rank in the league’s bottom five for forwards, defensemen and goaltenders. Last season both Petr Mrazek and Arvid Soderblom posted an .894 save percentage and it’s fair to expect something similar this season. To their credit, they weren’t totally awful when accounting for how bad the team was in front of them. Mrazek allowed 0.7 goals above expected in 39 games while Soderblom allowed 2.4 in 15 games.
Still, neither has a strong track record. Soderblom gets an age-related bump coming into his prime, but he’s going to have to actually prove his mettle between the pipes if he’s going to be this team’s goalie of the future.
The wild card
Can Taylor Hall still be a top-line player?
It makes all the sense in the world that the Blackhawks acquired Taylor Hall this summer. The former first overall pick understands the pressure that comes with that role, and can help ease the transition for Bedard.
But he wasn’t someone acquired for vibes alone. He’s in Chicago to be a strong supporting winger for their young franchise center on the top line. That’s a big jump from the complementary role he had in Boston, on a team where he’ll be a lot more exposed. Hall will have to prove that he can still thrive in an expanded role.
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Hall doesn’t have a ton of weaknesses in his game. The 31-year-old is still effective at five-in-five and a power play contributor, just not to the capacity he was in years past. His scoring rate dropped to the third lowest of his career, as did his direct impact on scoring. The fact that Hall wasn’t a mainstay on PP1 could be a contributor there — though that’ll change in Chicago. Those same dips were also evident at five-on-five as well.
That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll keep trending downward from here. It’s encouraging that Hall was second in setting up his teammates’ shot attempts at five-on-five in Boston last year, with a high number of dangerous passes. That’s always been a highlight of his game — it’s just hard for it to actually show on the scoresheet when he’s playing with bottom-six talent.
That should change in Chicago with Hall likely stapled to Bedard. If he can maintain that element of his game the bounce back potential is there — as long as the Blackhawks’ instabilities don’t weigh him down at even strength. We have him penciled in for 62 points this season, a return to his 2021-22 form.
The best case
Bedard emerges as a McDavid-level producer (not just a McDavid-level talent) at five-on-five and on the power play. Reichel shows signs of being able to both carry his own line and mesh with Bedard. They finish out of the Central Division basement but still add a prime draft talent.
The worst case
The supporting cast fails to carry its weight, leaving too much work for Bedard and opening the door for bad habits and demoralization to creep in during Year 1. They finish with the worst record in the league by accident, but lose the lottery.
The bottom line
The Blackhawks aren’t going to be competitive just yet, but every game just gained some meaning thanks to the arrival of Bedard. There’s officially a source of inspiration in the near future, and the long-term isn’t as bleak. That’s the power of adding a future franchise player of his caliber.
How Bedard develops at the NHL level will be the measure of success, along with how the rest of the team sinks or swims around him. So even if Chicago finishes low in the standings, this should be the first year of real progress in their rebuild.
References
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Understanding projection uncertainty
Resources
All Three Zones Tracking by Corey Sznajder
Read the other 2023-24 season previews here.
(Photo of Connor Bedard: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images)
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