It is a long way back to contention in the NHL after tanking and bottoming out

Full-scale rebuilds (tanks) might seem like the best path for building a contender, but their recent success rates are abysmal.

When Kyle Davidson took over the full-time general manager duties of the Chicago Blackhawks in the second half of the 2021-22 season, he was inheriting a mess of a team. Following their 2015 Stanley Cup win, then-general manager Stan Bowman ran the team into the ground with a series of bad investments, bad trades, bad salary cap management and bad player evaluations.

It was not a team in a rebuild. It was not a team that just had a couple of random bad years due to some bad luck or significant injuries. It was not a team that naturally became bad because of decline and age.

It was a poorly run and poorly built team.

With the Blackhawks going nowhere, and a major prize looming in the 2023 NHL Draft in Connor Bedard, Davidson did what a lot of people want to see when a team hits a run of mediocrity or becomes stale.

He tanked it.

He also made no apologies for it.

He tore it down to the ground in one of the most obvious and blatant tank jobs of the salary cap era.

It was not just aging players or players at the end of contracts that were jettisoned for future assets. It was everybody. Everybody that had any sort of value.

Age, production, contract status and talent were all irrelevant as to who stayed and who went. Collecting as many future assets and positioning themselves for Bedard was all that mattered.

It started at the 2022 trade deadline with the trade of forward Brandon Hagel to the Tampa Bay Lightning for two first-round picks. Hagel was 23 at the time, under team control, and having a breakout year with 21 goals in his first 53 games with the Blackhawks. He has since become a top-line player in Tampa Bay, has a 90-point season under his belt, and is still just 27 years old.

It continued in the offseason when they traded Alex DeBrincat, a 24-year-old, two-time 40-goal scorer (coming off a 41-goal season) for nothing but draft picks. In the years since he has never scored less than 27 goals and scored 39 just a season ago.

That was accompanied by the trade of 21-year-old center Kirby Dach, just a couple of years after he was taken with the No. 3 overall pick.

They did not extend qualifying offers to restricted free agents Dylan Strome and Dominik Kubalik.

While Dach and Kubalik have not really been any sort of loss (and the Dach trade probably ended up being good value), Hagel, DeBrincat and Strome are all outstanding players that would still be at an age that would be beneficial to the Blackhawks both now and the future.

The roster purge continued during the following season when forward Patrick Kane and defenseman Jake McCabe were also traded for more draft picks.

The intention and plan was very clear: Finish near the bottom, improve draft lottery odds to land Bedard and stock-up on first-round draft picks that could hopefully produce enough players that could build the foundation of a winning team in the future.

In the end, the Blackhawks were in fact bad enough to finish near the bottom of the league, had the lottery balls fall their way to land Bedard, and between 2022 and 2025 made 11(!) picks in the first round as a result of the aforementioned trades (and others), while also making five second-round picks.

I bring all of this up because this week there was an article by Mark Lazerus at The Athletic where he was attempting to get Davidson to say “I told you so” and take a victory lap for getting the process right.

Davidson declined the opportunity to do so, and there is probably a good reason for that — he probably knows his team still is not very good.

And it is most definitely not good. At least not right now. That makes the timing of trying to hang a mission accomplished banner on the Blackhawks rebuild a little …. odd.

After getting absolutely obliterated over the weekend in back-to-back games, including one of the most appalling performances of the 2025-26 by any team in the NHL on Sunday, the Blackhawks are 27th in the NHL in league-wide points percentage, 22nd in 5-on-5 goal differential, 31st in 5-on-5 expected goals share, 19th in all-situations goal differential and 32nd (that would be last) in all-situations expected goal share.

They have all of those rankings despite Bedard taking a leap into superstardom while also getting some of the best goaltending in the league from Spencer Knight. Having a goalie playing as well as Knight is, and a bonafide superstar playing the way Bedard is, and still being this bad overall is an awful look for the rest of the team.

This is year three of Bedard’s career and year four of the rebuild and the team is still probably one of the worst in the NHL.

In year two of Bedard’s career they won less games than they did in the year they tanked to position themselves to get him.

There is no way anybody can possibly know at this point if this plan will work or produce results.

This isn’t to say there are not intriguing young players or good prospects in Chicago.

There is a lot of young talent here. There is a lot of potential. There are reasons for optimism.

But the harsh reality the Blackhawks are about to find out, and might already be finding out, is that not all of these guys are going to pan out as they hope or expect. Some will miss. Some will get hurt. Some will be just good NHL players instead of stars or building blocks. Not even the best player development organizations hit on everybody.

This also isn’t to say this process can not work or will not work.

The Blackhawks have the hardest piece of a potential contending team already in place in Bedard (a superstar level player) and that means something. A lot, actually. They also have some players that could still be really good.

The point is that these types of scorched earth rebuilds can take way longer than anybody ever anticipates. And that is assuming they ever actually work.

The Blachawks are three years into Bedard’s career and four years into the rebuild and are still, realistically speaking, not even close to contending. And probably not even close to being a playoff team. They still have not yet taken the jump from bad team to average team, and the jump from average team to good team is even harder to take than that.

They are not the only team in this position right now. Or in recent years.

Let’s talk about it.