The quieter opening of this year’s free agency period — at least at 1901 W. Madison Street — probably shouldn’t have been a surprise, given some of the late June reports trickling out regarding how aggressive the Blackhawks were going to be during this transaction-heavy time.
Based on the relative lack of veteran bodies acquired this offseason, it seems like the 2025-26 season is one where we’re going to get the most comprehensive look yet at this team’s potential future — and that’s intriguing! But a closer look at what’s coming up the pipeline in the next few seasons offers a little cause for concern.
This thought goes back to last Friday’s draft, when the Blackhawks traded for a third pick in the first round and used it to grab Mason West with the No. 29 pick, a two-sport athlete who’s about to play his senior year of high school football before hanging up his cleats for good. The quibble isn’t with the pick itself, but something Kyle Davidson said about the pick and the thought process behind it:
Kyle Davidson on trading up for Mason West: “I wanted to trade back into the first round to take a grand-slam hack. I’m swinging for the fences.”
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) June 28, 2025
He said he knows that trade wasn’t analytically approved from a pick value standpoint, but he’s betting on a hunch.
We can quibble about the semantics here, because taking a flyer near the end of the first round on a player with solid physical tools but one who remains a long-term project doesn’t feel like a “grand-slam hack” from this perspective. Still, late in the first round of a draft that was a bit top-heavy feels like a good time to take such swings and a GM having the conviction to do so is a good thing.
The question, though, is why Davidson has appeared so reluctant to take any other swings to add to this pipeline in ways beyond the draft.
The professional sports world is a copycat one, so look at the current champions as a barometer for what breeds success. The Florida Panthers do have a No. 1 overall pick of their own on the blue line (Aaron Ekblad) and a No. 2 overall pick of their own atop its center depth chart (Sasha Barkov) but still added solid youthful pieces from elsewhere several seasons before it reached hockey’s summit, including Matthew Tkachuk, Carter Verhaeghe and (/heavy sigh) Gustav Forsling. Colorado won a Cup in 2022 with quality youth added in seasons prior like Sam Girard, Devon Toews and Andre Burakovsky (probably not the version of Burakovsky the Hawks are getting!). These teams didn’t wait until the trade deadline before they won the Cup to add talent: it was a multi-season project.
At some point we’ll stop comparing the current Chicago process to what happened with the Hawks in the early/mid-2000s, because the construction of that dynasty feels more like an incredibly fortunate accident than consistently brilliant decision-making, but let’s do this dance anyway. If we say the 2019 drafting of Alex Vlasic was the start of this whole thing in the present, the only players under the age of 25 added from outside of the organization are goalies Spencer Knight and Arvid Soderblom. Take the 2002 selection of Duncan Keith as the starting point for the prior process and, six years later, they’d added the following players who were under 25 at the time of acquisition: Patrick Sharp (trade), Martin Havlat (trade), Kris Versteeg (trade), Andrew Ladd (trade) and Antti Niemi (free agent).
This doesn’t necessarily mean the Blackhawks had to throw $20 million of AAV towards Mitch Marner on Tuesday. It also doesn’t mean JJ Peterka or Trevor Zegras were destined for future success if they came to Chicago. The same could be said about other younger players who’ve been traded in the last year, like Matias Maccelli or Dylan Cozens or even Kaapo Kakko.
But when are these swings coming? When are the Blackhawks going to do more than just draft young talent? Thinking an entire team can be built out of prospects feels like a fool’s errand, with the current two-time champs as evidence that it takes more than just homegrown talent to be among the league’s best.
And speaking of that homegrown talent, there are absolutely some interesting players to watch. More from Connor Bedard and Frank Nazar highlight the forward group. Sam Rinzel was a joy to watch for nine games but now has a chance to prove his worth in a more reliable sample size. Oliver Moore is another first-rounder who seems on the verge of more NHL time. Artyom Levshunov and Kevin Korchinski are both candidates for longer stints in Chicago this season. Other guys like Nick Lardis and Samuel Savoie and Nolan Allan And Ethan Del Mastro and Ryan Greene should all have the opportunity for NHL ice time come September.
But is that all going to be enough?
Thrown 2025 No. 3 overall pick Anton Frondell in there as well but it still feels like there’s a lack of legitimate top-end talent in this prospect pool for long-term success. Factor that in with a GM who’s been reluctant to take swings in years past and may now be paying for that lack of action because the soaring salary cap is only going to make it more difficult to add talented players through free agency or trades.
So, yeah, we’re going to see the kids this upcoming season — more than we have at any other point during this whole process. That’s going to make things more interesting, although it likely doesn’t mean the team is going to make any real moves in the standings.
More importantly, though, we’re going to need to start seeing some of these kids take massive steps forward and perhaps into roles they weren’t initially expected to fill because, these kids might be all that the Blackhawks have.