VANCOUVER, British Columbia — When a Sharks reporter asked Connor Bedard on Wednesday about his experience on the Blackhawks‘ young roster this season, Bedard delicately tried to correct him.
“Coming into the season, we were pretty old, actually,” Bedard said Wednesday. “Not old, but older. I guess, ‘wise.'”
The gist of the question was correct, though, because the Hawks have gotten much younger. When they last visited Vancouver in November, for example, the big storylines were Luke Richardson healthy-scratching Taylor Hall and Seth Jones suffering a foot injury. When they landed in Vancouver again Friday, none of those characters were on the plane.
The Hawks’ average age of 28.0 currently makes them the NHL’s 10th-youngest team, and that’s with Alec Martinez, Pat Maroon and Nick Foligno still skewing the data. Meanwhile, they now have 11 players aged 23 or younger, plus another three 25-year-olds.
Frank Nazar, Landon Slaggert, Colton Dach, Louis Crevier, Ethan Del Mastro and Artyom Levshunov have all been called up from the AHL throughout the season, and Spencer Knight and Joe Veleno were also recently acquired.
With college prospects Ryan Greene, Sam Rinzel, Oliver Moore and/or Dominic James potentially turning pro soon, that group could expand further.
“It makes it a lot of fun when you have guys that are all around the same age [who] are trying to learn together and grow together,” Bedard added.
“Obviously, we want — every year and every game — to keep getting better. Then, when we’re all at the point where we’re winning and competing in big games, it’s going to be that much better looking back on this and going through it together.”
This is what general manager Kyle Davidson imagined when he (controversially) decided to move on from Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews in 2023. He wanted the Hawks’ next generation to have freedom to establish their own organic culture, and that is now happening.
On Sunday in Denver, they had a lively team dinner. On Wednesday in San Jose, they tried to see the new Captain America movie — but the theater had a power failure, creating a funny story to be told and retold for years to come.
Even in the locker room before and after practices and games, the mood feels lighter. Foligno on Monday not-so-vaguely attributed that to Jones’ departure, opining about “hard decisions…benefiting the group.” But the change probably stems even more from who has arrived than who has left.
“The guys that come in, they bring energy,” Lukas Reichel said recently. “They’re just having fun. They’re not like, ‘Oh no, [it’s the] NHL.’ They want to stay here, and they want to be NHL players. That’s what you need.”
Said Slaggert: “There’s definitely a youthful energy in the room. Being able to chirp each other, too, [means] you’re more comfortable. It helps the group as a whole. Guys have other guys their age that can get in their ear, and everyone feeds off that. It creates an environment where everyone is able to speak up.”
Said Crevier: “Before going on the ice, I look around and [think], ‘Oh, I’ve played with these guys before in Rockford.'”
The next step for the Hawks, of course, is learning how to win together. They haven’t made much progress on that front yet. Their five-game point streak was momentarily encouraging, but now they’re staring down a winless four-game road trip unless they beat the Canucks on Saturday.
That learning-to-win process will realistically take a while, next season certainly included. And there is the terrifying risk they follow the Sabres’ path and never learn how.
But at least the process has begun. Many of the Hawks’ best prospects haven’t reached the NHL yet, but enough have to make these late-season games seem like glimpses into the future. The players can sense that, too.