NEWSLETTER
When the Blackhawks announced a late night trade on Friday, social media once again showed us that there are fans out there who aren’t paying attention to what Chicago general manager Kyle Davidson is doing.
Davidson said early in training camp that he wasn’t against adding salary if he could bring in assets to help the organization in the process. And that’s precisely what he did on Friday night; he saved Vancouver $1.3 million at the cost of a second-round pick in 2024.
Some folks out there are legitimately upset that he acquired a second-round pick to send a depth defenseman to Vancouver and help the Canucks get closer to under the salary cap.
People, we need to talk about this.
Davidson inherited a mess of an organization and won the permanent GM job because he sold his rebuild plan to ownership and the brain trust that was involved in hiring the new person in that job. Since he became the permanent general manager, he has been consistently transparent about his plan.
He wants to build through the draft. Davidson wants to identify his prospects, draft them, and then develop them.
And guess what? That’s exactly what he’s done.
As a reminder, we have Davidson’s entire track record as general manager of the Blackhawks on this site — and we’re doing that for a reason.
Davison has made 12 trades since becoming the interim general manager of the Blackhawks. In those 12 trades, he has acquired:
That’s 12 picks, including five first-round picks, three second-round picks, and three third-round picks in the 2022-24 drafts.
Thus far, the picks he’s acquired have turned into Kevin Korchinski, Frank Nazar, Sam Rinzel, Paul Ludwinski, Ryan Greene and Gavin Hayes.
And Davidson has two picks in the first, second and third rounds in each of the next two drafts. As it stands right now, Davidson has nine picks in 2023 and ten in 2024. And he made 11 picks in the 2022 NHL Draft.
He told us what he is going to do, and he’s doing it. Now we need to be patient for him to use those picks and develop those players before we judge the job he’s doing to turn this franchise around.
