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MONTREAL — At this point, prospects drafted by the Blackhawks should know there’s a sizable chance their rights will be traded before they sign.
The Hawks are reaching the stage of their rebuild where so-called “future assets” — draft picks and prospects — are more valuable as trade chips than as building blocks.
The youth movement within their NHL roster is fully underway, and a number of additional high-end players are scheduled to arrive in the NHL within the next year or so. There are far more talented prospects in the pipeline than NHL spots available, and the intense battles for those spots should allow the cream to rise to the top.
The Hawks shouldn’t and won’t abandon their pipeline moving forward. It will be important to keep a steady flow of prospects pushing toward the NHL every year. But it no longer needs to be a gushing river of prospects like it has been.
The biggest ingredients in NHL success that the Hawks still lack, however, are established veterans who can fill gaps in the lineup and inject immediate experience and talent.
With the skyrocketing salary cap basically killing free agency as a viable way to acquire those kinds of players — since every team now has enough cap space to re-sign everyone they want — trades will be the primary method of acquiring them for the next couple years.
Even the trade market was quiet this past summer because the entire league believed they could compete this season. No general managers felt compelled to sell off established players for picks and prospects. But that seems likely to change next summer.
The Canucks, Flames, Predators, Blues and Kraken are all discovering they actually cannot compete — to various degrees of severity — as currently constructed. The Bruins and Penguins have over-achieved but are nearing age cliffs, too.
Many of those organizations will pivot toward rebuilding or retooling in 2026 or 2027, whether they publicly admit it or not. Beyond then, cap growth should eventually return to a normal annual rate, re-establishing equilibriums within the free-agency and trade markets.
That’s when the Hawks, as they enter their own contention era, will be eager to flip from sellers to buyers. They’ll want to package together picks and prospects for established players — the opposite of what they’ve done so far during GM Kyle Davidson’s tenure.
And since rebuilding teams generally seem to prefer picks over prospects, because that gives them the freedom to select any prospect their scouts prefer, having a robust treasure chest of picks to trade will be valuable.
That’s something the Hawks can work on building out this season. They have a handful of pending free agents — forwards Jason Dickinson and Ilya Mikheyev and defensemen Connor Murphy and Matt Grzelcyk — whom they could shop around leading up to the March 6 trade deadline if the team has fallen off a playoff-bubble pace.
If they deal away a couple of those guys, they might prefer a 2027 or 2028 pick over a 2026 pick in return. The same rule might apply when they trade some young NHL and AHL players that get squeezed out by superior peers — another inevitable trend in the years ahead.
The Hawks already own five picks in the first two rounds of the upcoming 2026 draft — two first-rounders (their own and the Panthers’) and three second-rounders (their own, the Maple Leafs’ and the Islanders’) — whereas they’ve so far only acquired one pick in any draft beyond that (the Canucks’ 2027 second-rounder).
It might even make sense for Davidson to swap one or two of those early 2026 picks into a future pick in the same round or higher. Impatient GMs are often sniffing around with the opposite objective.
If the Hawks can continue harvesting fruits of the rebuild even after they’ve moved past it, they’ll be very well-positioned in the NHL landscape.