Last season wasn’t enjoyable for the Blackhawks, but it wasn’t completely miserable, either.
The Sharks cannot say the same so far this season.
As the Hawks move on from their “tank year” — having achieved their ultimate goal of landing the No. 1 pick, Connor Bedard — and progress into the next stage of their rebuild, it only takes one glance westward to appreciate the relatively stable ground upon which they now find themselves.
That’s because it appears there was a not-too-distant alternate universe where things could’ve gone much, much worse last season.
In July 2022, new Sharks general manager Mike Grier took over an old, overpaid and mediocre team several years removed from its last playoff berth and began methodically trading away most of its core players.
He converted those aging assets into draft picks and prospects while gutting the existing NHL roster, positioning his team to be one of the NHL’s worst to maximize their draft-lottery odds. He hopes to get lucky and land the slam-dunk No. 1 pick to be his next franchise cornerstone.
That sounds eerily familiar because Hawks GM Kyle Davidson did the exact same thing, tracing a tried-and-true formula for rebuilds across pro sports. The only differences between Grier and Davidson’s moves are the names of the core players traded away (Erik Karlsson, Brent Burns, Timo Meier, Adin Hill) and the name of the slam-dunk No. 1 pick (Macklin Celebrini).
The comparison even holds up when examining the few notable players both teams kept for their tank years: One longtime leader with a no-trade clause (Patrick Kane and Logan Couture) and one star recently signed by the previous GM to an ill-advised eight-year contract extension (Seth Jones and Tomas Hertl).
And thus the Sharks entered 2023-24 with the lowest point total over-under in the league at 65.5 points, two points lower than the Hawks’ betting line entering 2022-23. The two teams’ trajectories seemed very similar.
Twelve games in, however, they’ve diverged tremendously. That 65.5-point line looks comically high because the Sharks look comically terrible.
They’re 1-10-1, on pace to finish the season with 21 points, even after finally earning their first win Tuesday against the Flyers. That victory followed 10-1 and 10-2 losses to the Canucks and Penguins, respectively, that made them the fourth team in history to allow double-digit goals in consecutive games (and the first ever to do so entirely at home).
They will inevitably exceed that impossibly low 21-point mark, but it seems conceivable — if not likely — they could finish below the 2016-17 Avalanche (48 points) and 2013-14 Sabres (52 points).
They’ve been outscored 56-14 while getting blown out by three-plus goals in seven of 12 games. Last season’s Hawks, by comparison, endured only 28 losses by three-plus goals over 82 games and finished with 59 points.
And therein lies one crucial difference between the two teams’ paths. The Hawks, led by a motivated first-time head coach in Luke Richardson, scrapped and battled and remained competitive throughout the vast majority of their tank year. The Sharks, led by retread coach David Quinn, seem to have mostly given up.
If this ineptitude lingers all season in San Jose, the damage it will inflict on the locker-room morale, the development of prospects and young players (including 2021 first-rounder William Eklund) and the overarching culture of the organization could easily negate the long-term benefits of the rebuild.
The Hawks, meanwhile, maintained relatively high morale while actually strengthening their internal culture last year. That left this year’s team a foundation to build upon, and the rookies integrating into the roster have benefitted from that.
There’s plenty of work left to do, but everything appears to be on track for the Hawks — just like a classic dynasty-mode rebuild in a video game. Compared to the Sharks’ horror-movie rebuild, that’s something worth being thankful for.
