SALT LAKE CITY — Typically patient and friendly Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson seemed to be fighting to contain annoyance Tuesday when the subject of Lukas Reichel came up.
“He’s got to show and play a certain way,” Davidson said. “[He needs to] have the habit that, if it’s in practice, he shows he deserves to be in the lineup, and if he’s in the lineup, he plays a certain way that we expect [so] that he’ll hold a spot. It’s in his hands.”
Inside his head, Davidson has surely been frustrated for a while now by the former first-round pick and his struggles to reach his lofty ceiling.
Davidson committed a new two-year contract to Reichel even after his massively disappointing 2023-24 season, hoping he could get his career back on track after a summer of mental rejuvenation and physical training, but Reichel’s 2024-25 season is already off to an equally rough start. He struggled during the preseason and failed to make the opening-night lineup, instead sitting out Tuesday against Utah as a healthy scratch.
“He’s got to work and get to the point where, if an opportunity opens up, he’s going to jump in and take advantage of it,” Davidson said.
The Hawks’ insistence that Reichel must prove he deserves a roster spot in order to receive one represents a different approach than last year, when he was handed the second-line center role right away and then gradually slipped down the depth chart due to his poor performance.
That divergence is partly because the Hawks don’t want to use the NHL as a developmental tool as much as they have in the past. They’ve concentrated their developmental efforts almost entirely in Rockford, whose lineup this year will be loaded with notable prospects (including Kevin Korchinski, Frank Nazar and eventually Artyom Levshunov).
But it’s also partly because the Hawks intend to demand not just hard work and a high compete level from this year’s NHL roster — the main emphases during the past two years, when they were trotting out one of the worst lineups in the league — but also some semblance of proper execution.
“It’s not just trying,” coach Luke Richardson said. “Everybody’s trying, hopefully. It’s the best league in the world, [so] you have to have execution, or someone else is going to…have that chance to do it.”
Said Davidson: “We talk a lot about [how] we want the team to compete, but that’s a baseline, right? That needs to happen. Then [I] would like to see further execution, and hopefully just more wins and more productivity with the puck.”
In terms of talent, the Hawks still lag behind most teams. There’s a reason sportsbooks project them to have the fourth-lowest points total in the league, ahead of only the Sharks, Ducks and Blue Jackets.
There’s a reason Davidson gave a non-answer Tuesday when asked Tuesday if he expected the team to be in the playoff race, noting only that “hopefully we’re a team that over-performs…[what] the public discourse has been.”
In terms of experience, though, the Hawks are actually flush with that — at least for now, during this odd interim season between the tanking years and the upcoming youth-takeover years.
They have plenty of veterans who should know very well how to follow, implement and carry out a game plan, even if they don’t have the speed or skill to keep up with opposing teams’ stars.
That explains the new focus on execution. And for younger players like Reichel, Korchinski and Nazar, they will have to demonstrate they can match that level of execution before they usurp any veterans.
That’s not meant to be a roadblock, since Davidson plans for those youngsters to indeed push out the veterans eventually. But the bar that must be cleared in order to do so has been raised.