LAS VEGAS — Chicago Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson will proudly name someone with the No. 2 pick in the 2024 NHL Draft on Friday.
And then, Davidson will return to the Blackhawks’ draft table and begin preparing for the 18th pick. On Saturday, Davidson will oversee the selection of even more draft picks. Come Monday, he’ll likely sign a handful of free agents.
As Davidson does all of that, his focus won’t change. Sure, he’d like the Blackhawks to improve next season, and there may be opportunities for that in the next few days, but none of that changes his priority: his original rebuild plan and long-term vision.
“Those are the conversations we have all the time internally,” Davidson said recently. “Does this make sense, short, medium, long term? Sometimes you can satisfy one of those, but it’s rare that you can satisfy all three horizons. And then it’s just your risk tolerance in terms of where you’re willing to go and what you’re willing to do. You always want to continually push and try and make sure that you’re doing everything you can for the organization, whether it’s your prospects, your team in the best situation to succeed short and long term.
“But you can’t risk your upside as well. And so, you can’t just go spend money or trade for players recklessly or put players in the NHL before they’re ready unnecessarily if it’s going to hurt you longer term and not allow us to sustain something that we want to create and we think can be really special. We don’t want to short circuit that.”
All of that takes patience and time, which general managers rarely have in the NHL. Even as Davidson was promised patience and time when he was promoted, one of the first questions was how long he would actually have to execute his plan. Because as much as Davidson doesn’t appear to be steering off course, he’s not the ultimate decision-maker within the organization.
That person is Blackhawks chairman and CEO Danny Wirtz. What is he thinking right about now?
On Friday morning at the ARIA Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Wirtz sat down for an interview with The Athletic and discussed his thoughts about the Blackhawks’ rebuild.
(Note: Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Kyle Davidson’s rebuild plan requires a lot of patience. Fans are starting to grow a bit more impatient. Davidson has stayed on track with his messaging, but where does your patience stand?
Patience is not just for the result, or when the result comes, but that we’re actually patient to get things done the right way. And that’s kind of hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
And so, making sure that every step is done intentionally. Look, patience also doesn’t imply that we lack our own drive to want to get to that place. I don’t think there’s anybody in the organization that is happy with not winning. So we all want to win, but we also know it’s just not a button you press. You don’t just press the button and then the results follow. You have to follow the process, and we have a plan.
One of the big things we really also focus on is we want to get to a place where we have sustained success. So just satisfying our hunger to eke in the playoffs and then take a couple steps back a couple years is not success in our minds. Our mind is on getting in and staying in.
And to do that, you have to do all those things along the way to get there. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily about timeline. It’s about progress for us, I think, seeing things come to fruition. Clearly, the last couple of years the building has been primarily through asset acquisition. Now we’re in both acquisition and development and seeing results and starting to see players that have gone through the process and pay off.
Like maybe (Alex) Vlasic is our first real good example, seeing him through, having him do the time in Rockford and then seeing him contributing on the ice. And if those things start to click with some of the other players, like we think they will, now the team starts to improve.
Another thing Kyle’s really adamant about, too, as committed to this plan as he is and we all are, the plan has to stay flexible to opportunity. We find ourselves with opportunity every day, potentially. And you can’t be so kind of dogmatic about the plan that you miss when there’s a chance to improve your team. Not to shortcut or not to do something that actually derails your team, but actually might present itself as a valuable option that we didn’t think about three months ago or even two weeks ago.
So always staying open to those things, and I think that’s kind of where Kyle’s mindset is now — how do we improve our team while continuing to develop our players through the draft as we have?
Did you have to get sold on this approach? It seemed like when you became CEO, the organization was going to take a step back, then accelerated a rebuild again, and then everything sort of crumbled. The prospect pipeline was pretty nonexistent then.
Your prospect pipeline has to be what you hope it’s going to be. And if it doesn’t pan out, then the whole thing crumbles. I’m not saying we were in that dire of a position, but you know, we needed to make sure that we got things right from the very origin.
I think the rebuild was not just on the ice. The rebuild was in process and personnel and approach and technology and data and all the ways in which we make decisions and evaluate players to, ultimately, put Kyle in the best position to make those decisions — all that was the re-engineering work in the last couple years. And, obviously, the fruits of that are now just starting to bear, to which we’ll see if that was successful, which we think it will be.
Did you have to buy into this particular approach? You can see Connor Bedard’s impact right away, but most prospects are likely going to be like Vlasic. Frank Nazar or Oliver Moore might need three to five years from when they’re drafted to be in the NHL and have an impact.
I think there’s always a sort of managing expectations. But at the same time, what I hopefully don’t do is put false expectations or some level of urgency that’s kind of fabricated for no reason. We’re really fortunate, we’ve owned this team for almost 100 years now. There’s no investor that’s like, we’re looking to do this, we have to hit a milestone. And I think when you do those things, that’s what creates downward pressure that is not in the best interest of the organization. I don’t think that puts our managers in a position to make the right decisions for the long run.
It is rare for an organization to go ahead with a rebuild like this and give it the patience it requires.
It’s a tremendous luxury we have as a long-term family in this league. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not interested or we don’t have the same level of urgency as fans. We are just as excited about winning. We are just as antsy about winning.
But you’re saying it’s a matter of seeing those steps through?
We just know if we do these steps right, Kyle will be successful, we’ll be successful, the team will be successful, and everyone’s going to be in a good spot. I think accountability is another piece. Kyle’s accountable. He knows he has to deliver this — deliver a winning team. But putting too many constraints around him will force him to do things that I don’t think are in the best interest of the organization.
Are you starting to sense fans being impatient? This rebuild only started recently, but for them, it goes back to not making the playoffs since 2017.
Oh, absolutely, it’s not fun. It’s not fun losing. It’s more frustrating when you see shoots of — you obviously have players like Connor (Bedard) and you start to see some of those better games we’ve had where there’s those signs of good things to come, and you want to just press that fast-forward button, and that’s human nature. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think that’s the kind of pressure that we’re under and that’s the pressure we’ve signed up for being in this business.
Kyle has been pretty careful not to put a definitive timeline on the rebuild. Are you someone who believes it takes as long as it takes, or do you have a set expectation for when?
I think it’s less about a date or a deadline and more about how we just have to see progress year over year, and that’s through multiple dimensions, too. Obviously, we want to see us finishing higher than we did last year. We want to see the development of our players take a step forward. We want to see our team culture continue to take a step forward. We want to be able to see those steps each year over year, and that will ultimately lead to the thing. So I care more about the how than the ultimate when. That will happen if you get that how part right.
You spent time with Kyle and his staff in Florida and have gotten to know their process. Are you confident in how he’s going about this?
Extremely. And I think, it’s not only his leadership and his care for the process, but his approach and collaboration with others, too.
As brilliant as Kyle is, he’s also really good about bringing other minds around the table to get information, the way he utilizes information both scouting information and analytics. But ultimately, he’s very clear that he makes the call and he’s accountable, and I think that’s one of the great things about him. Because I think sometimes you can over-consensus your decision-making where you’re listening to too many people. But he’s really clear what he’s looking for. He’s going to garner information from people that he knows and trusts, and they give him both either supportive views or contrarian views that allow him to make the best decision.
And to me, getting back to the how, ultimately he’s going to make the call. It’s his job to do it. I’m really proud of how he’s making these decisions. They’re multi-dimensional and very informed.
Were you supportive of his decisions around Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane before and even now likely not signing Kane this summer?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the questions I ask Kyle are less about “How did you get to that decision? What are the factors you’re thinking about?”.
I sometimes ask questions. Have you thought about this? The good news is that he has. He’s not shooting from the hip. He’s not reacting out of emotion or gut.
He’s following a very logical and sometimes unemotional approach, which is hard, especially in emotional decisions.
There’s a chance they could always still end up there or sign one-day contracts, but was it hard to potentially know that they might not retire as Blackhawks?
In a storybook ending, it would be perfect, of course. But there’s no question, when their playing days are officially done, then, both formally and informally, they’re Blackhawks forever.
We will celebrate those days down the road and our fans will celebrate those guys. They’re cemented into the fabric of Chicago at this point, so there’s no turning back. Whether their last game — I always love looking back at some of the players, and you forget about some of the last teams they played for, like (Chris) Chelios played for Atlanta. I forget that (Wayne) Gretzky played for St. Louis.
Like all those things, they become small footnotes as opposed to the bigger pieces of work these players represented.
What impact has Connor Bedard had from a business perspective, or maybe eased the rebuild? You obviously had to get lucky, but you arguably achieved the first phase of getting a potential superstar player. How’s that all been from your perspective?
You can’t underestimate how important he’s been. But I said this to (president of business operations) Jaime (Faulkner) and the team, I think, right after we secured the No. 1 pick, we’d been hard at work getting a lot of the other stuff done kind of from a business standpoint and rebuilding the business under Jaime. So that when Connor came, it wasn’t just like, let’s just ride this wave.
The foundation was built for how to run this business, how to take advantage of an opportunity like this and to actually have it drive business results that are outsized versus we just sat back and let Connor fall in our laps and let’s just answer the phones and take orders. Like, no, this is a very strategic, purposeful business that was built with or without Connor. Connor became the accelerant for the business.
I had seen some fans react to your trip to Florida for the scouting camp recently as an owner getting too involved in the process. You haven’t seemed to be a meddling owner, but what was the trip’s purpose for you?
It was an informational trip for me. This wasn’t a, “I’m there because I’m going to put my eyes on the guy, hey, down the road, thumbs up, thumbs down.” No, I really take that to heart. When I go down there, I just want to be one of the guys and just listen and absorb and learn. Because again, no matter what happens, the decisions we make — I guess I will be signing a check of some significant size with any of these players. To actually know, from the very origins of scouting all the way through their playing in the pros, who these players are and what they’re all about is important.
In terms of the signing the check portion, the Blackhawks haven’t been a cap-ceiling team in recent years for obvious reasons. If you do get competitive again, will you have any financial restrictions on Kyle?
I think it goes to the same thing we’re approaching with everything, it’s just I need to understand the thought process and the reasoning. I need to see the value equation. And I think now Kyle is bringing in more kind of advanced information that actually quantifies value more than just kind of the traditional gut reaction that comes from kind of wanting to do certain transactions.
So I think there’s actually now some science behind it. Which again, if you’re going to sign the check, I want to know that those steps have been taken, and I feel really good about that.
With the second pick tonight, regardless of who you take, what significance do you think this will have?
It’s an important, important pick. I know we’ll get it right. We’re going to get a great player and another piece to the puzzle. When you start to look at it in aggregate, and time will tell, you know the success is not done at drafting. The success is done when these players are actually able to develop into ready-to-go NHL players. That’s when you know if today was successful or not.
But you know, for everything we need to do to get done today, I feel really good that we’re going to end this weekend in a better spot as the Blackhawks than we were started.
(Photo: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images)
