After drafting one power forward in Anton Frondell at No. 3 overall, the Blackhawks added even more size to their forward prospect pool during the latter stages of the first round of the NHL draft Friday.
Vaclav Nestrasil, a 6-5 Czech winger, was selected with the No. 25 pick — as had been rumored as a possibility for several weeks.
Minutes later, Hawks general manager Kyle Davidson swung a draft-day trade with the Hurricanes — a frequent occurrence — to acquire the No. 29 pick and used it on Mason West, a 6-6 winger from Minnesota.
Both Nestrasil and West are extremely raw prospects who will need years to become ready for pro hockey, but the Hawks have so much else in the pipeline that they can afford to wait.
Davidson claimed he wasn’t targeting size, that it instead “just worked out that way,” but that’s difficult to believe — especially since both are relatively good skaters for their size, which the Hawks always covet.
Nestrasil’s upside
Nestrasil tallied 42 points in 61 regular-season games with the USHL’s Muskegon Lumberjacks. That isn’t an eye-popping number for a first-round pick by any stretch, even though he recorded 34 in his last 40 and added 13 in 14 playoff games (en route to a league championship).
But the Hawks have followed him for a while because he formerly played with 2024 first-round pick Sacha Boisvert and he shares the same agent as Ryan Donato. His older brother, Andrej, also had a brief NHL career in the mid-2010s. And they believe his development curve so far suggests his upside is high.
“He’s a cerebral player,” Hawks scouting director Mike Doneghey said. “He does have to get stronger, but that’ll come with maturity. He’s 6-5, 180-something pounds. It’s still all coming together for him, but [with] his brain and his hands, he’s got the ability to play up the lineup.”
He’s headed to UMass next season.
West’s versatility
Based on analytical models’ pick valuations, Davidson overpaid to trade up for No. 29, giving up both of his second-round picks this year (Nos. 34 and 62) as well as a 2027 fifth-round pick. He knew he was doing so.
But the Hawks had intel that one of the teams drafting between No. 29 and No. 34 was planning to take West, and Davidson decided to act upon a hunch that West is going to hit as a prospect.
“I just really wanted to get back into the first round and take what I thought was a grand-slam hack,” Davidson said. “I was swinging for the fences and figured, ‘Why not? Let’s go for a big one here.’ So that’s what I did.”
West is a fascinating story as a dual-sport athlete who currently quarterbacks the football team at Edina High School. As only a rising senior, he will again this fall.
For some time, there were significant questions about which sport he would pursue at the next level; he had football offers from the likes of Miami (Ohio) and Marshall. But he had blue-blood hockey offers, and he recently put concerns to rest by committing to Michigan State over Boston College.
“I’m really big on developing,” West said. “I’m still a raw player, and I’ve got a lot of things to work on. I’m really starting to move faster right now just because…I’ll be 100% on hockey.”
He recorded 49 points in 31 games for the USHL’s Fargo Force last season, and the Hawks are confident Michigan State coach Adam Nightingale — who also coached Artyom Levshunov — will be able to get the most out of him in 2026-27 and beyond.
“When you see me play, I think you can really see the quarterback in me. I think I have really good sense and vision,” West added. “I want to be a playmaker. I want to score. I want to hit. I want to be a physical player on the ice. But I kind of want to be a unique player, in the sense of trying to find it hard to compare guys to me.”
The encouraging development of pre-existing Hawks prospects Sam Rinzel (another Minnesota high schooler whom they traded up to draft late in the first round in 2022) and A.J. Spellacy (another football/hockey dual-sport athlete) likely contributed to the Hawks’ interest in him.
“The raw tools are just something you don’t see that often,” Davidson said. “He’s probably available at that point because he’s behind the curve. He’s not quite dedicated himself 100% to hockey. But at that size, that athleticism, that skating ability [and] that talent, the sky is the limit.”
Yet to come
The draft will resume at 11 a.m. Saturday (NHL Network), and the Hawks have plenty left to do, as has been the case every year of Davidson’s tenure.
Even after trading their two second-round picks, they still have one third (66th), two fourths (98th and 107th), one sixth (162nd) and two sevenths (194th and 197th) left.
Davidson has swung many trades on the second days of drafts prior, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see one deal go down Saturday — even if it’s simply another anticlimactic pick swap of some sort.
More trades?
The Hawks reportedly tried to trade for ex-Sabres forward JJ Peterka, a pending restricted free agent who was ultimately dealt to the Mammoth for young defenseman Michael Kesselring and young forward Josh Doan.
The Sabres were panned for that underwhelming return, but the Hawks didn’t have many established NHL players of comparable caliber to offer. They only have prospects and picks, which apparently the Sabres didn’t want.
Most of the other hottest names in the NHL rumor mill right now are defensemen, which won’t appeal to the Hawks. Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli reported Friday the lack of available forwards has led to an uptick in interest in the Hawks’ Lukas Reichel.
Davidson, like at the combine, described the trade market as relatively stagnant due to the rising salary cap.
“It could be a one-year anomaly, but that’s just the way it is right now,” he said. “We’ll see if anything comes available that’s advantageous for us to jump on, but outside of Andre [Burakovsky], we haven’t really had that arise on our end.
Two more games
One significant aspect of the NHL and its players association’s new collective bargaining agreement, a four-year agreement which was announced Friday and will go into effect in July 2026, is the addition of two games to the regular-season schedule starting in 2026-27. Two preseason games will be removed to compensate for the 84-game (rather than 82-game) season.
The maximum contract length will also be shortened by one year, to seven years for re-signings and six years for open-market free agents.
That latter change could affect Hawks youngsters Connor Bedard and Frank Nazar, whose entry level contracts expire the day the new CBA begins. They would need to sign extensions before officially hitting restricted free agency in order to get an eighth year.