(Editor’s note: Plenty coming your way over the next few weeks without Blackhawks hockey, including game threads for the Olympics. Stay tuned!)
Defining success for the Blackhawks was always going to be a challenging proposition this season due to the difficulty in finding objective benchmarks for it. A surge in the standings could be attributed to puck luck or supreme goaltending that wasn’t indicative of sustainable success. A return to the league’s basement could also be tolerated if a handful of the Hawks young players took enough steps forward to offset the team’s collective step backwards.
As we’ve arrived at the Olympic break with just over two-thirds of Chicago’s 2025-26 season behind us, there are still enough games left for the Blackhawks to churn out another positive development or two before the full 82 are completed. And for this season to feel like a real success, they’ll probably need to do that.
Let’s start off with the good news so far, shall we? We’ll ignore the veterans since they’re not part of the long-term puzzle here but that means we can dive right into the season of Connor Bedard, who was on an unreal 22-game heater featuring 36 points (16 G, 20 A) prior to injury that briefly had him among the top scorers in the entire league and offered our surest sign yet that the superstar player we were promised is on the way. Elsewhere up front, Frank Nazar surged out of the gate with 20 points (5 G, 15 A) in the first 25 games and looked like an excellent compliment to Bedard in the top six. In net, Spencer Knight has probably been the team’s steadiest performer all season long and worthy of consideration as the team’s franchise goalie for the next decade. On the blue line, standout moments from Wyatt Kaiser and Alex Vlasic probably top the list of highlights. Louis Crevier at least looks an NHL-caliber defender and Artyom Levshunov has produced glimpses of the talent that made him a No. 2 overall pick. We’ve also seen quality play from the young forward trio of Ryan Greene, Oliver Moore and Nick Lardis, suggesting all three will be NHL-caliber players as well down the road.
The bad? Well … most of that has emerged in the last month or two. Bedard’s injury interrupted that incredible run he was on and, while his production has been solid in the games since, he isn’t quite back to where he was in November. Nazar’s scoring slump preceded his injury and has largely continued since his return. Those two are healthy but now Kaiser is not. Levshunov’s standout moments essentially disappeared in 2026 and the hopeful future anchor of the blue line spent the last few games watching from the press box.
Secondary scoring has been largely absent over the last few months and combining that with injuries to Bedard and Nazar led to a 12-21-5 stretch since Nov. 18 following a 10-5-4 start that’s seen Chicago go from a team in wild card contention to one likely watching the postseason yet again. With 53 points in 57 games (22-26-9), Chicago is 10 points behind Anaheim, the current holder of the second wild card spot, which has 63 points in 56 games. The Hawks probably need something like 40 more points — and even that’s probably a touch low — to be considered postseason-worthy. Anyone think this team’s capable of winning 20 of their final 25?
But that’s not a deal-breaker for this season, either. Success wasn’t going to be reside solely on this team’s postseason status in 2025-26 — that’ll come later. But, as of this writing, it feels like the only things we can reasonably conclude from the data we have so far is that Connor Bedard is a legit future star and Spencer Knight is a legit future No. 1 goalie. Everything else seems up in the air, doesn’t it?
Nazar needs to produce for more than just a month to indicate he’s a future top-six forward. Levshunov needs to flash more of the positive moments we saw earlier in the season so we can continue living with his youthful mistakes. Sam Rinzel needs to show his rough start to this season can be chalked up to growing pains. That Vlasic-Crevier duo that’s being touted as a shutdown D pairing needs to provide more evidence that it’s worthy of a label. Moore and Greene need to offer more signs of their NHL futures and Lardis needs to do so as well, should he get the chance. If Kaiser returns, more quality outings from him certainly wouldn’t hurt things, either. And it’d be a wonderful development if Kevin Korchinski presented us with glimpses of the talent that made him a top-10 pick after his increasingly imminent return to the NHL once a roster spot is made available for him.
Don’t rush to any conclusions regarding any of the names from the paragraph above, either, because the mention of those names is not meant as an ultimate decision on the fate of their NHL careers. In fact, every single player in that section could still take significant steps forward over the final 25 games and force us all to revisit our projections for future Hawks lineups. The grades here are still mostly incomplete.
But some of those steps probably need to be taken over the last two months of this regular season, because it’s been a fairly bleak stretch of Blackhawks hockey lately and two more months of that might result in some louder and harsher questions being asked of where this whole operation is heading.