At first look, and if you happen to had been solely trying on the ultimate rating, it is perhaps simple to have a look at the Chicago Blackhawks‘ 3-2 loss to the Florida Panthers on Tuesday evening as a considerably promising begin to their 2025-26 season. They went into the house of the back-to-back Stanley Cup champions and gave them a battle. It was a one-goal recreation, and in principle one that might have gone both approach.
That may be a wildly optimistic view of the sport. It might even be wildly inaccurate. If something, it was one other harsh reminder that this may very well be one other lengthy season for the Blackhawks as they proceed their seemingly perpetual rebuild.
Not solely had been the Blackhawks outshot by a 37-19 margin, the Panthers had 32 scoring chances to only 14 for Chicago during 5-on-5 play (38-20 in all conditions), had 18 high-danger possibilities to solely 4 for Chicago, and had greater than 77% of the anticipated objectives. The sturdy play of Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight is the one factor that stored this recreation shut on the scoreboard. The precise tempo of the sport, and the play on the ice, was not.
This was additionally a Florida workforce taking part in with out its two finest gamers in Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk on account of harm. You don’t want to overreact to only one recreation, however it continues to exhibits how far behind the top-tier groups the Blackhawks stay.
The Blackhawks nonetheless wouldn’t have the gamers to compete
That can be an enormous drawback and calls all the technique of this rebuild into query. Whereas there’s a strong assortment of younger expertise in place, together with 2022 No. 1 general decide Connor Bedard and younger middle Frank Nazar, the Blackhawks have not likely completed something to begin constructing round them and begin complementing them.
The centerpiece of this rebuild was purported to be Bedard, and the Blackhawks gutted their roster for the 2021-22 season in an effort to place themselves for him on the high of the draft. When the lottery balls fell their approach, it was a stroke of fine fortune that ought to have kickstarted the rebuild.
Bedard is now getting into 12 months 3 of his profession and the Blackhawks nonetheless appear as distant from contending as they did the yr earlier than he arrived. That isn’t an exaggeration, both. They received fewer video games within the second yr of his profession than they did within the yr they tanked to get him, and this offseason they did comparatively little so as to add to the roster.
Their largest offseason strikes had been bringing in Andre Burakovsky and Sam Lafferty, whereas signing some returning gamers like Knight and Ryan Donato to multi-year contract extensions. That isn’t sufficient. Particularly when the Blackhawks are engaged on 5 consecutive non-playoff seasons, with just one playoff look previously eight seasons.
Even that one playoff look over that point is deceptive, as a result of that got here within the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season when the league expanded the sector to 24 groups. The Blackhawks had been the Twenty third-ranked workforce within the league. In a standard season, with a standard playoff format, they’d not have even been shut.
It’s particularly not sufficient offseason motion when the Blackhawks nonetheless have greater than $14M in unused salary-cap house and have virtually no person signed to long-term contracts.
The Blackhawks like their farm system. They like their prospects. They just like the younger gamers. The issue is that merely throwing all of these younger gamers right into a persistently dropping atmosphere the place they cannot compete isn’t going to assist anyone’s improvement. Not their very own particular person improvement, definitely not the event of the group.
