From the first few practices of this year’s Blackhawks training camp, it’s been pretty evident that offseason addition Andre Burakovsky is going to be one of the two wingers skating alongside Connor Bedard to open the season, with Ryan Donato slated to be the other.
There are a ton of young kids in the Chicago lineup this year who are unknown quantities due to their lack of NHL experience. Burakovsky is also an unknown quantity but only because of his fresh arrival here, so let’s see what we can learn about this expected top-line forward for the upcoming season.
A brief summary of the career of Burakovsky, who turned 30 in February, is that the former first-round pick of Washington steadily ascended with the Capitals, hit his career peak while with the Avalanche and was a big part of them winning a Cup as a result, then cashed in during free agency by signing with Seattle where an injury-plagued trio of seasons there led to him being dumped to Chicago in an offseason move.
This trajectory is pretty easy to see in his basic stats from the last six seasons:
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | P | ATOI |
| 2019-20 | COL | 58 | 20 | 25 | 45 | 15:12 |
| 2020-21 | COL | 53 | 19 | 25 | 44 | 15:06 |
| 2021-22 | COL | 80 | 22 | 39 | 61 | 16:16 |
| 2022-23 | SEA | 49 | 13 | 26 | 39 | 16:33 |
| 2023-24 | SEA | 49 | 7 | 9 | 16 | 14:34 |
| 2024-25 | SEA | 79 | 10 | 27 | 37 | 14:25 |
That first season with Seattle was a pretty good one, albeit limited by a season-ending groin injury sustained in February. He had a rash of injuries in 2023-24, which kept him off the ice for long stretches and seemed to afflict him during the increasingly rare instances when he was on the ice. Burakovsky’s health was much better last season but the production wasn’t quite where it had been earlier in his career, likely a toll taken by the rash of injuries and Burakovsky no longer being in the prime age for hockey players.
You can see some of this downward trend portrayed in the data below from JFresh’s player cards, with the 2023-24 season first followed by the card from the 2024-25 season:
For a little more of an in-depth look at what Burakovsky has been when at his best, let’s check out data from Corey Sznajder’s All Three Zones project, beginning with his peak 2021-22 season in Colorado, when he was a key offensive force on a team that boasted plenty of other offensive firepower. Burakovsky was fifth on that team with 61 points in the regular season but further down the stat sheet in the postseason because injuries — of course — limited him to just 12 of Colorado’s 20 postseason games during that Cup run. He still produced at a high rate, though, with 8 points (3 G, 5 A) in that dozen of appearances.
That is a whole bunch of blue.
Of note, though, is that some of the darkest hues of blue are in more pass-oriented parts of the offense like shot assists, point shot setups and one-timer assists: all indicative of the nifty hands Burakovsky has displayed throughout his career. He has a solid shot as well, boasting an impressive career shooting percentage of 13.3 percent. Combine all that with plus-skating on a a 6-foot-3, 203-pound frame and it’s easy to see how Burakovsky became such an offensive force. His top three linemates during that regular season were also offensive weapons themselves in Nazem Kadri, Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen.
The peak of all that is in the past, though. Let’s see what the data from Burakovsky’s last two seasons with the Kraken look like with Sznajder’s data, starting with 2023-24:
Certainly not as much blue there, especially in the prior season. Seattle’ team trajectory trended downward in a similar manner as Burakovsky’s numbers did, as the Kraken went from a 100-point playoff team in 2022-23 to missing the playoffs in each of the last two seasons. If there is one area that offers some hope for what Burakovsky will bring to Chicago, it’s in his continued strong performance in the transition areas of the game. A younger, speedier Blackhawks lineup will need to excel in there, and Burakovsky has continued to do so as other parts of his game have trended southward.
An area that won’t offer as much hope is a closer examination of those three seasons in Seattle based on the quality of Burakovsky’s linemates, because it never really decreased during his time there. In the 2022-23 season, it was Alex Wennberg and Matty Beniers, followed by Jaden Schwartz and Wennberg again in the 2023-24 season. Last season, it was Jared McCann and Chandler Stephenson, who were the top two scorers for the Kraken. That suggests Burakovsky may be trending more towards the anchor of the line than the player driving it. Click through the individual data from Natural Stat Trick for Seattle forwards from last season and Buraskovsky was in the bottom half of pretty much every category tracked there from 5-on-5 play.
Most things have been trending downward for Burakovsky for the last few seasons and that those trends continued while he was with Seattle’s top two scorers from the last season isn’t encouraging. He’s also now on the wrong side of 30, which isn’t going to raise hope that a career revival is awaiting him in Chicago.
The line with him and Bedard and Donato has been good during the preseason, though. During 20:54 of 5-on-5 ice time together, that trio has advantages of 19-15 in shot attempts, 13-7 in shots on goal, 14-8 in scoring chances and 7-3 in high-danger chances, all adding up to a 63.92 percent expected goal share. The quality of competition there is an obvious caveat and we’ll see what happens when the games actually count in the standings.
An optimist could point to Burakovsky’s skill set as a forward with solid hands and vision being a perfect compliment for Bedard, who would benefit from having someone who can actually get him the puck in prime scoring areas. A pessimist could point to the trends of the last few seasons and suggest they’re not going to get any better on a team likely headed for the bottom of the league standings again.
Either one could be right.