At first look, and in the event you had been solely trying on the closing rating, it may be straightforward to take a look at the Chicago Blackhawks‘ 3-2 loss to the Florida Panthers on Tuesday night time as a considerably promising begin to their 2025-26 season. They went into the house of the back-to-back Stanley Cup champions and gave them a combat. It was a one-goal recreation, and in principle one that would have gone both method.
That may be a wildly optimistic view of the sport. It will even be wildly inaccurate. If something, it was one other harsh reminder that this might be one other lengthy season for the Blackhawks as they proceed their seemingly perpetual rebuild.
Not solely had been the Blackhawks outshot by a 37-19 margin, the Panthers had 32 scoring chances to only 14 for Chicago during 5-on-5 play (38-20 in all conditions), had 18 high-danger possibilities to solely 4 for Chicago, and had greater than 77% of the anticipated targets. The sturdy play of Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight is the one factor that saved this recreation shut on the scoreboard. The precise tempo of the sport, and the play on the ice, was not.
This was additionally a Florida workforce taking part in with out its two greatest gamers in Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk attributable to damage. You do not need to overreact to only one recreation, nevertheless it continues to exhibits how far behind the top-tier groups the Blackhawks stay.
The Blackhawks nonetheless do not need the gamers to compete
That can be an enormous drawback and calls the complete technique of this rebuild into query. Whereas there’s a stable assortment of younger expertise in place, together with 2022 No. 1 total choose Connor Bedard and younger middle Frank Nazar, the Blackhawks have not likely achieved something to start out constructing round them and begin complementing them.
The centerpiece of this rebuild was alleged to be Bedard, and the Blackhawks gutted their roster for the 2021-22 season in an effort to place themselves for him on the high of the draft. When the lottery balls fell their method, it was a stroke of fine fortune that ought to have kickstarted the rebuild.
Bedard is now coming into 12 months 3 of his profession and the Blackhawks nonetheless appear as far-off from contending as they did the yr earlier than he arrived. That’s not an exaggeration, both. They gained fewer video games within the second yr of his profession than they did within the yr they tanked to get him, and this offseason they did comparatively little so as to add to the roster.
Their greatest offseason strikes had been bringing in Andre Burakovsky and Sam Lafferty, whereas signing some returning gamers like Knight and Ryan Donato to multi-year contract extensions. That’s not sufficient. Particularly when the Blackhawks are engaged on 5 consecutive non-playoff seasons, with just one playoff look up to now eight seasons.
Even that one playoff look over that point is deceptive, as a result of that got here within the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season when the league expanded the sector to 24 groups. The Blackhawks had been the Twenty third-ranked workforce within the league. In a traditional season, with a traditional playoff format, they’d not have even been shut.
It’s particularly not sufficient offseason motion when the Blackhawks nonetheless have greater than $14M in unused salary-cap house and have nearly no person signed to long-term contracts.
The Blackhawks like their farm system. They like their prospects. They just like the younger gamers. The issue is that merely throwing all of these younger gamers right into a constantly shedding setting the place they can’t compete is just not going to assist anyone’s growth. Not their very own particular person growth, actually not the event of the group.
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