DENVER — The Blackhawks are universally expected to be one of the NHL’s worst teams this season, if not the absolute worst. After all, they were not-so-subtly designed to be.
But Patrick Kane raised a fair point Tuesday: Preseason expectations for the Hawks haven’t proven correct in years.
In 2017, 2018 and 2019, the Hawks were a projected playoff — or at least bubble — team entering each season, but underperformed significantly each time. In 2020, the Hawks were a projected bottom-feeder, but actually overperformed and hung around in the race for a while. And in 2021, the Hawks were projected to return to the NHL’s upper echelon, but immediately fell on their faces.
So Kane quietly dismisses all the recent chatter about how terrible this team will be. It’s not that he doesn’t understand the logic behind the skepticism, but he has learned never to believe in the illusion that hockey is predictable.
“The past five or six years, people were picking us to make the playoffs or win the Cup,” he told the Sun-Times. “It’s easy to say those things or get excited about those things, but you have to put the product on the ice. It’s the same thing right now. A lot of teams are projected to be ahead of us, but it’s all about what we do on the ice.”
Kane, of course, was the subject of just as much offseason chatter as the Hawks as a whole.
At the start of training camp, he and Jonathan Toews both insisted they hadn’t talked to the Hawks — nor had Hawks general manager Kyle Davidson talk to them — about potentially waiving their no-trade clauses. Neither admitted then to having seriously contemplated leaving Chicago or where they might end up.
Nothing has changed on that front over the past month; no trades are brewing yet. But it’s a fact they’re both entering the final years of their contracts, and their career trajectories don’t match that of this deeply rebuilding organization beyond next summer.
So in all likelihood, this will be Kane and Toews’ final season with the Hawks, meaning Wednesday’s game against the Avalanche will be Kane and Toews’ final regular-season opener in a red-and-white sweater.
They know that; everyone knows that. And that thought has indeed crossed Kane’s mind, even if not with quite the degree of sentimentality and emotion one might expect.
“It’s just kind of natural to think about, especially given the position that I’m in,” he said. “But I don’t know. I’m not thinking about where I’m going to finish [the season], or if this is my last season in Chicago — nothing like that. It’s just more like focusing on starting off well. … It’s a long season, so I try not to get ahead of myself too much.”
Whether one believes him or not, that way of thinking is undeniably on-brand for Kane. While Toews constantly weighs big-picture implications and ponders long-term outlooks, Kane focuses without distractions on the day-to-day nuances of his job. That yin-yang dichotomy has contributed to their success for 14 years together and counting.
And thus, most of Kane’s present thoughts center on rapport-building with new linemates Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou, who collectively deferred to Kane far too often during the Hawks’ ugly 1-5-0 preseason.
“You don’t want to overload these guys with information,” Kane said. “You want them to play the game and be able to make the reads themselves. The first thing I told them when we came to camp was, ‘Let’s be shooters. Let’s not look to over-pass.’ And we did that anyway to start.
“Once we get going and realize how each other are going to play and gain that chemistry even more than we have now, it could be a good line. … Both those guys skate so well. They could bring a whole new element to the game that I’ve never really had, as far as [them skating] up the middle with that speed and pushing the ‘D’ back.”
Even during the Hawks’ dynasty years, Kane himself rarely reached his ‘A’-game during the preseason. He has approached camps in various different ways over the years, futilely hoping one way would lend better results, but now — at age 33 — has accepted it just takes him “a little while to get going” each fall.
Kane eventually finding his form and racking up points — no matter the situation around him — is one hockey-related thing that has always been predictable, though, and he’ll almost certainly do it again this season.
Even within last year’s team-wide trainwreck, Kane tied a career high with 66 assists and recorded his third-highest season point total (92). Going from Alex DeBrincat to Domi and Athanasiou is a downgrade, but he has repeatedly established an ability to dominate alongside just about anyone.
It’s much harder to fathom the rest of the Hawks replicating Kane’s capacity to thrive amid chaos. Any objective analysis of the roster reveals a dire lack of game-breaking talent.
The “vibes” in the locker room have nonetheless been positive so far, Kane said, and sometimes even the surest analyses miss something unquantifiable — just look at the 2017-18 Golden Knights, for example. Every once in a while, hope without reason becomes self-fulfilling.
Will that work for the 2022-23 Hawks? Probably not. But Kane, feeling the gears starting to spin beneath him on his final trip around the Hawks rollercoaster, is simply ready to stop wondering and start finding out.
“We’ll see how we start off,” Kane said. “The feeling with our team, our coaches, the players, is that we’re going to be better than a lot of people think, and I think that’s true. But it all depends on what the performance is on the ice. We can say whatever we want, but it’s important to see how we do once we get out there.
“Enough talk for now.”
Note: The Blackhawks’ plague of injuries to defensemen continued at practice Tuesday when Connor Murphy and Alex Vlasic both left early.
Murphy, bloodied by a puck that deflected into his face, received stitches and will be fine, coach Luke Richardson said. But Vlasic feels discomfort from a shot-block in practice Monday and could miss Wednesday’s game. That’ll thrust waiver claim Jarred Tinordi, with just one Hawks practice under his belt, into the lineup.
