One trade that haunts the Blackhawks years later

Only one team wins the Stanley Cup each season, the rest are all left with some level of disappointment. For some team, a dramatic sweep in the playoffs or a bad showing against a big rival causes tempers to flare and trades to take place in the offseason, something the Blackhawks know all too well.

The 2016-17 Chicago Blackhawks finished first in the Central Division and in the Western Conference. The Blackhawks were 50-23-9, with six different players registered over 20 goals.

After a first round exit in a Game 7 to the St. Louis Blues in 2016, it seemed likely the Blackhawks would bounce back against the Nashville Predators in Round 1 and start a long postseason run once again.

The Blackhawks were just two years removed from winning their third Stanley Cup in six seasons, and there was reason to believe they would have success again with a team that now featured Artemi Panarin on the wing opposite Patrick Kane.

The Blackhawks know all too well the cost of overreacting to a bad Stanley Cup Playoff showing.

The Blackhawks were swept at the hands of the Nashville Predators, who would go on to face the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Final. While Nashville would eventually fall short of the cup, they were one of the hostest teams through the second half of the season, a big shock to the Blackhawks in Round 1.

Then general manager Stan Bowman would go on to reshape the Blackhawks at the NHL Draft in 2017, making two trades that still surprise Hawks fans to this day, trading Niklas Hjalmarsson to the Arizona Coyotes and Artemi Panarin to the Columbus Blue Jackets.

For this story today, I am focusing more on the trade of Panarin for Saad. While the Hjalmarsson trade definitely didn't help the Hawks in the short term, Connor Murphy is still one of the best defenders in Chicago—a veteran leader who could be one of the main connections to the Toews and Kane era to the Bedard era.

If Blackhawks fans had a time machine I think the main trade they would look to stop would be Panarin for Saad. Artemi Panarin was a rising star in the NHL, someone who would go on to register 55 goals and 169 points in two seasons with the Blue Jackets before signing with the New York Rangers where he has put up 186 goals and 550 points in 430 games.

Panarin enjoyed playing alongside Patrick Kane, and I believe the two could have kept the Blackhawks playoff window open longer. As a reminder, excluding the bubble postseason in 2020, the Blackhawks have not made the playoffs since their 2017 loss to Nashville—the Panarin trade might have sped up their decline.

By no means is the Blackhawks fall on Brandon Saad. Saad did registered 18 goals and 35 points in his return to Chicago. Bowman's thought when making the trade was that Jonathan Toews needed a return of his top linemate in Saad more than Kane needed Panarin to be successful. That ended up not really working as Toews put up just 52 points during the season and while Kane did replicate his success now with Alex DeBrincat, it was not as creative or lethal as it was with Panarin.

Now, there is an elephant in the room regarding this trade. Panarin was only signed for two more seasons, and he did walk from Columbus the minute his contract was up. Saad was signed for four more years so the trade offered more long term stability.

Getting that out of the way, I believe Panarin would have re-signed in Chicago anyway, as he was already with an original six team in a big market—the exact situation he left Columbus for New York.

When the Blackhawks postseason window closed, it closed quickly with the 2017-18 team finishing seventh in the Central Division with a record of 33-39-10. If Panarin was still a member of the Blackhawks going into the 2017-18 season, I wonder if the outcome would have been different.