Two years into Kyle Davidson’s rebuild, Blackhawks players aren’t feeling quite as patient about it as he is.
Michael Reaves/Getty Images
After a Blackhawks practice in April 2022, shortly after Kyle Davidson took over as general manager and announced a full-scale rebuild, Alex DeBrincat made a comment that revealed just how little he understood that concept.
“If we come out hot or doing well,” DeBrincat said, looking ahead to the 2022-23 season, “there’s no point to rebuild after that, right?”
Of course, DeBrincat was long gone by the time 2022-23 began, having been shipped off as part of the tear-down stage of Davidson’s rebuild.
Two years later — after the franchise’s two worst seasons since the 1950s — Hawks players possess a much more vivid and accurate understanding of what a full-scale rebuild entails. If anyone else besides DeBrincat was initially wearing rose-tinted glasses, those glasses have been smashed to bits by now.
But understanding doesn’t necessarily equate to agreeing, and patience from the Hawks’ remaining veteran leaders — guys like Nick Foligno, Seth Jones, Connor Murphy and Jason Dickinson — seems to be wearing thin.
Davidson’s declaration last weekend that the rebuild’s tear-down stage is complete and build-up stage is ready to begin should help reassure the veterans this constant losing won’t be interminable. But to some extent, and understandably so, those guys will have to see it to believe it.
Jones’ perspective
Jones’ exit interview last weekend, for example, offered an honest and enlightening glimpse into his rebuild fatigue as well as his keen understanding of the forces at play in this situation.
“I didn’t really want a rebuild when I left Columbus,” Jones said. “When you’re my age or Nick’s age, you want to win, and it’s frustrating when you’re not able to do [anything] about it. Obviously, there’s different expectations when it comes to management and when it comes to players. We want to see results now. We’re not as patient as they are. We don’t play this game forever. They’re in the game a lot longer than we are.
“I would tell management today, ‘Go sign a bunch of free agents.’ Or, ‘Go do this, go do that.’ But it’s not up to us.”
Jones has been increasingly upfront about his unhappiness with how his Chicago tenure has gone so far. That doesn’t mean he has quit trying to improve himself or the team — he has actually improved quite a bit in the second halves of each of the last two seasons — but he has quit mincing words.
So he’s willing not only to publicly campaign for Davidson to sign some better players but also to share his theories as to why the 2023-24 Hawks were even worse than expected and what types of players Davidson should sign.
“When you have a team of one-year deals, it’s extremely difficult to get everyone on the same page of a common goal,” he said. “Everyone wants points; everyone’s going to do that to look out for themselves.
“We need guys that want to play 10-to-12 minutes on a fourth or third line. [Guys who will] go out there, do his job and be happy that the team won without scoring a goal or getting a point. … He doesn’t care about that; he just wants to see the team win. We call them ‘identity pieces.'”
He looks at the Predators (currently battling the Canucks in the first round) and Flyers (who would’ve made the playoffs if not for a late-season implosion) as supporting arguments.
“No one thought they had a chance to be even competing for the playoffs,” he said. “When you look at those teams, you can see they’re all on the same page, they’re doing the same thing [and] they’re working toward a common goal, because team success is the driving force toward you getting another deal. Everyone wants winners. That’s something we really have to hammer home.”
Foligno’s perspective
Jones and Foligno have privately discussed all of this at length, and they seem to largely agree with each other. Foligno is just slightly more willing to mince words because he’s the team’s de facto captain, a close friend of Davidson and the possessor of a more optimistic worldview.
In Foligno’s exit interview, he pushed back on Jones’ opinions about teams composed of players on one- and two-year contracts. Foligno himself, after all, arrived in Chicago last summer on a one-year deal yet earned an extension because he invested so much emotion in the entire organization.
But he admitted he doesn’t believe the 2023-24 Hawks were “ready to be as accountable as we needed to be,” and he also called on Davidson to accelerate the rebuilding process at least a little.
“The good organizations, they don’t stand pat for very long,” Foligno said. “I don’t want to be one of those teams that’s rebuilding for five or six years. Not for selfish reasons; just [because] that’s not how you really grow a winning culture. You can’t be in that cycle for so long.
“I just don’t want to see us toil and be OK with maybe 10 more wins next year. I want to be like those teams that were pushing for the playoffs in the last bit of the season. I think that’s a realistic goal for this group.”
Pushing for the playoffs is actually not a realistic goal, whereas 10 more wins is. That would get the Hawks to 33 wins next season, which would represent a very healthy — likely larger than expected — leap forward and a strong indication that Davidson’s plan is working well.
It’s just difficult for players in the thick of the on-ice fight every night to wrap their heads around that concept, just as it was difficult for DeBrincat to wrap his head around the concept of rebuilding whatsoever two years ago. As Murphy once wisely explained, “no matter what roster you have or what game you’re going into, you have to expect to win — it has to hurt to lose.”
Foligno delivered some even more pointed words after the Hawks’ season-ending loss in Los Angeles — words that Davidson surely heard and considered heading into exit interviews.
“We are a team that needs to make some changes here,” Foligno said then. “This isn’t good enough. This can’t be good enough. This has to change drastically over the summer.
“We can’t go through this again. And I certainly won’t allow it. Either the mindset changes from the group, or personnel changes. That’s just the way it is in the NHL. It’s a business, and we need to treat it as such.”
With that general sentiment, Davidson appears to agree.
Changes are imminent this summer; almost every Hawk on an expiring contract will not be re-signed, and an array of better players signed on the open market and promising prospects ready to graduate into the NHL will take their places.
Will those changes and the moderate win-loss improvement likely to come in 2024-25 be enough to keep Foligno, Jones and the Hawks’ other leaders satisfied enough, even as another precious year without postseason play gets shaved off their dwindling careers? That remains to be seen.