What Frank Nazar’s contract tells us about Blackhawks’ approach to re-signing players

The Blackhawks‘ front office has begun to establish one strength: re-signing players.

Second-year forward Frank Nazar’s contract extension Thursday, which locked him in Chicago for seven more years — beyond this coming season — at a $6.59 million salary-cap hit, helped cement that pattern.

The deal falls into the same category as the team-friendly contract young defenseman Alex Vlasic inked last summer: six years with a $4.6 million cap hit.

In a separate category, but still contributing to the trend, is the contract that veteran forward Ryan Donato signed in June: four years with a $4 million cap hit.

It had begun to look like Donato was heading to the open market, where he could’ve cashed in due to the scarcity of good free agents this summer. The fact that the Hawks only had to compromise slightly on their initial $3.5 million offer to bring him back was relatively impressive.

General manager Kyle Davidson fared well in all three negotiations. Chris O’Hearn, who joined the Hawks’ front office in January after earning a reputation as a great negotiator with the Wild, likely helped with the Donato and Nazar deals, as well.

Earlier in Davidson’s tenure, he overpaid substantially to persuade players to re-sign. The two-year extensions with cap hits between $4.25 and $4.5 million handed out to Nick Foligno, Jason Dickinson, Petr Mrazek and Andreas Athanasiou in 2023 and 2024 all fell in that bucket, with the latter two contracts aging especially poorly.

But the Vlasic, Donato and Nazar contracts are more meaningful indications of the regime’s negotiating skill. Foligno, Dickinson, Mrazek and Athanasiou were signed for time periods during which the Hawks knew cap space would be a non-issue and reaching the cap floor would be more relevant. The same can’t be said about the coming years.

Davidson’s front office has yet to translate this skill into bringing in outside free agents, though. They’ve failed to woo most of their targets and whiffed badly on some of those they’ve signed (such as T.J. Brodie).

Next summer will present the next opportunity to change that narrative, and given how crucial a summer it could be for finally acquiring some established talent, the Hawks need to seize that chance.

Connor McDavid, Cale Makar, Kirill Kaprizov, Artemi Panarin, Jack Eichel and Kyle Connor headline the NHL’s loaded 2026 free-agent class. Although many of them will re-sign with their current clubs, it should still end up being a better class than the 2025 group.

The Hawks will also need to work out new contracts for pending restricted free agents Connor Bedard, Kevin Korchinski and Spencer Knight, among others.

Nazar’s perspective

The philosophy of signing Nazar to a seven-year deal after less than one year in the NHL — during which he had 26 points in 53 games — is reminiscent of the Hurricanes’ approach.

They’ve done that a ton in recent years, with forward Jackson Blake being the most recent example. He had 34 points as a rookie last season, then signed an eight-year contract with a $5.12 million cap hit this summer.

Davidson and Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky are indeed friends and frequent trade partners, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Davidson continue to try to replicate Tulsky’s tactics.

Just 56 NHL appearances into Nazar’s career, it’s too early to declare how good of a player he’ll be in, say, 2028 — much less in 2032, when his contract expires. That’s the inherent risk in the investment.

But there’s also a potentially high reward. If Nazar takes another big step forward and doubles his production this season, the Hawks will suddenly have a bargain contract on their hands.

Plus, a $6.6 million cap hit will become increasingly less prohibitive as the cap rises. When it kicks in in 2026-27, it’ll occupy 6.3% of the projected team cap ($104 million) — the same percentage a $5.3 million cap hit occupied in 2023-24, for example. By 2031-32, it’ll occupy an even smaller percentage.

From Nazar’s perspective, it was difficult to decide whether to sign this summer or to wait and bet on himself raising his value.

“I always go into everything thinking I’m the best,” Nazar said Friday. “Because the day you don’t think you’re the best, you probably shouldn’t be playing hockey. You’ve got to have that confidence and know you can do this and [believe] you’re going to beat any guy out there. That was the part that took the longest, trying to figure out what I wanted to do in that regard.

“But I’m always a man of making the best decision at any time [with] the best odds. It wasn’t hard when you put all that stuff together to look at it — in the long run — and see that I could be in Chicago for seven years, playing with the team basically of my dreams in a city I want to be, with a crew you want to be with.”

In the end, he essentially guaranteed a life-changing amount of money for him and his family, and he eliminated a possible distraction from his on-ice play during the coming year.

“I don’t think anything really changes for me,” he said. “It’s the same me, same exact everything. It’s just a little bonus for my play and what I can do. I’m still super motivated and want to be the best player I can be. Now I just want to win more than I did last year.”

He has spent most of the summer training at Fifth Third Arena since winning gold with Team USA at the world championships in May. His takeaways from that tournament have stuck with him.

“When you play with a team that close and that talented, it’s truly special,” Nazar said. “That’s what I want to bring to Chicago and to the team here. Everyone gets that taste of winning and that feeling of what it’s like to come together as a team, and that’s something I want to focus on.”