LAS VEGAS — What always made Alex Nylander so frustrating wasn’t the lack of a “motor” everyone in Buffalo warned everyone in Chicago about. It wasn’t the occasional disappearing act, or the occasional half-hearted backcheck, or the occasional lost-in-space moment in the offensive zone.
No, what made Nylander so maddening were actually the high points. The way he’d suddenly carve his way through three defenders and create a golden scoring chance. The way he’d snipe a puck seemingly out of nowhere for a goal. The way he’d occasionally feather a perfect little pass through traffic. If it weren’t for those flashes of brilliance, it’d have been easy to move on from him, to keep him buried in the minors, or to not trade Henri Jokiharju for him in the first place.
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Ah, but Stan Bowman loved a reclamation project. He thought Nylander could be a star with a Patrick Kane-like flair. He thought Nikita Zadorov could become the big, booming top-four defenseman his size suggested but his six-season body of work did not. He thought Henrik Borgström could be a flashy middle-six center who could stabilize the lineup. He thought he could do for every struggling former first-rounder what he did for Dylan Strome (who has since come back down to Earth after his stellar start with the Blackhawks).
Bowman valued pedigree and potential more than proven performance, and Nylander — the No. 8 pick in the 2016 draft — was right up his alley. So he moved the solid but unspectacular Jokiharju for the boom-or-bust Nylander. And sure enough, Nylander finally went bust when interim GM Kyle Davidson sent him to Pittsburgh on Wednesday for bottom-sixer Sam Lafferty.
That the Blackhawks — the worst five-on-five offense in the league, a team desperate for goals beyond Alex DeBrincat — didn’t even bother giving Nylander one last chance in the NHL before moving on is telling. After all, 10 goals and 16 assists in 65 games in his one full season with the Blackhawks, back in 2019-20, might not seem like much, but it’s frankly a lot more than most of the current roster is doing. But Nylander already was a liability, and after missing all of last season with a knee injury, he hasn’t even been the tantalizing/infuriating player he once was. In 23 games with the AHL’s Rockford IceHogs, Nylander had just eight goals and four assists — not exactly dominant. And let’s face it, he never was the type to take a minor-league assignment as a challenge rather than a curse.
Davidson isn’t Bowman, that much is clear. Based on conversations with front-office sources, the interim GM is a realist, not a sentimentalist, operating without the stubbornness of his predecessor, who often clung to failed moves hoping they’d eventually pan out. He’s anything but married to Bowman’s reclamation projects (that likely doesn’t bode well for Borgström, who has been, well, just kind of fine, at most).
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No, Davidson sees this roster for exactly what it is — inadequate and underperforming. And he sees the forward prospect pipeline for exactly what it is — barren and alarming. It’ll take years to address it all.
In the meantime, Davidson is looking for tangible effort, not intangible hope.
So while Lafferty languished in Mike Sullivan’s doghouse in Pittsburgh, he’s a hair-on-fire kind of player whom interim coach Derek King will love (once Lafferty gets out of COVID-19 protocol, that is). And the Blackhawks believe there’s more skill, more offense, to be mined there. And under Davidson, the Blackhawks prefer to work on bringing out the skill in a player who tries rather than work on bringing out the effort in a player with natural skill.
“Honestly, I had no real input,” King said. “They just asked me: ‘Lafferty, this is what he brings, could he help us?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’d love to have a guy like that.’ He’s an energy guy. The reports I’m getting back are he’s got a little more skill than people give him credit for, but he plays hard and we could use that. So they did the deal.”
Of course, the question becomes, how many bottom-six “effort” guys can you fit in one lineup? Jujhar Khaira’s a physical guy whom the Blackhawks believed had offense to give. Recently-acquired Kurtis Gabriel’s another. Reese Johnson’s another. Ryan Carpenter and MacKenzie Entwistle and Mike Hardman and Josiah Slavin and Brett Connolly are around, too.
At some point, you need someone who can score, right? With Lafferty and Brandon Hagel going into COVID-19 protocol shortly before Thursday’s rock-bottom 6-4 loss to the Coyotes, the Blackhawks had Nicolas Beaudin taking warmup rushes on the top line, and Strome centering the fourth line in a desperate effort to balance out the scoring beyond DeBrincat and Kane.
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With eight or nine bottom-sixers in the mix, every lineup is a shrug and a guess.
“You’ve got to get a rotation going a little bit,” King said. “I put Strome down there to help get him with that kind of role where it’s changing his game, like we talked about, which he did a fabulous job with. With all this COVID and all this other stuff … we’ve got to have some bodies and guys to fill those roles. I can’t put Patrick Kane down to fill that fourth-line spot; I don’t think he’d be happy with me. But the thing with Stromer is now if somebody is a little sick or something or injured, you’ve got guys who can fill those spots at the bottom, but then I can move Stromer up top and give him that opportunity to play with some more skilled guys.”
In other words, the Blackhawks — completely bereft of forward talent in the pipeline beyond Lukas Reichel — could really use a young-ish forward with some upside, a guy with skill, a guy who can keep up with Kane or DeBrincat or Hagel or Toews, a guy who could inject some depth-scoring into this moribund lineup.
A guy like Alex Nylander, right?
No. Not anymore. The era of reclamation projects is over. Probably two or three years too late, but it’s over. And the Blackhawks would rather play a sure thing than keep rolling the dice.
(Top photo: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images)
