A New Era of Blackhawks' Hockey is Upon Us

Now that all of the big deals are now completed for the Chicago Blackhawks it's time to focus on what's important. To put it bluntly it's about Kyle Davidson to now use all this draft capital to try and build a championship roster.

If you combine the 2022 Draft (Davidsons' first draft) with the next 3 drafts that would make 18 players in the first 2 rounds that Davidson could add to our future roster. If you look at the league wide percentages of a player hitting (according to www.dobberprospects.com) it looks like this:

Prospects to play over 100 NHL games:

1st round: 37.3%... Davidson already drafted 3 in 2022 (Korchinski, Nazar, Rinzel) and will have at least 2 in each of the next 3 drafts (possibly another 1st if NYR reach the conference finals this year). That means 9 players from the first round by the time the 2025 Draft is completed. So if you just go by league average that means 3 or 4 players would be long term players. Given the fact that at least 5 of these picks are lottery I'm going to bump up the odds and say that 5/9 of these picks will be core Hawks.

2nd round: 17.2%... This is where it gets more difficult. This basically says that we will only get 2 important pieces out of the selections. Given that 4 of these picks will be in the 30s I will say that 3 of the 9 picks will make it as apart of our core.

So just out of the top 2 rounds over a 4 year span I'm anticipating 8 true important pieces to be added. The 3rd round goes to a 13.7% chance, the 4th to 10.9%, 5th-6th are 7.5-7.9% only. The Blackhawks will have plenty of quantity here, Including the 22 draft that would make 10 picks in that range with a median hit rate of around 10% making it only likely 1 of those players is an important piece moving forward.

So that means that just from drafting alone the Blackhawks should net 5 first round players, 3 second round players, and 1 mid round player that make up our next core trying to win a championship. Anything more than that from just drafting would be unusally good in terms of selecting NHL talent by Kyle Davidson. Nine players could certainly be an entire top 6 of forwards and top 3 defenseman so it stands to reason this could certainly only take 3 more drafts before we've acquired our next group.

Then there is the patience. We will then have to wait for these players to mature and be ready for the NHL game. Highly picked forwards are in the NHL within 2 years on average, defenseman in 3 seasons. That would put the Blackhawks in a true competitive window of the 2028-29 and beyond timeframe. To put it all in perspective Kevin Korchinski (the first Davidson draft pick) would be just 24 years old at the start of the 28-29 season. So while it seems far away now, remember all these picks will still be young. The Blackhawks will have to be smart in adding veterans and complementary pieces during this time.

The Blackhawks' future is bright, a new era of players will soon usher in and I can't wait to see whom Kyle Davidson drafts. Will we just get lucky and select Connor Bedard? Odds don't favor it, but who knows. Please note that the drafts after the 2023 draft also boast some tremendous talent. Macklin Celebrini, Cole Eiserman, Aron Kiviharju, Michael Misa, and James Hagens all look like franchise changing talents too. We will have plenty of chances to select one of them.

Patience Hawks' fans... This might take awhile.