Blackhawks Prospect Pool Climbing Rankings ...Middle East

At The Athletic, Scott Wheeler has been providing his mid-season pipeline rankings of the 32 NHL franchises. What I like most about the prospect evaluation that takes place at The Athletic is the very different views and evaluations of prospects we get from Wheeler and Corey Pronman; they aren’t writing in unison and often don’t agree on a prospect’s potential/ceiling. That is certainly the case with a number of Blackhawks prospects.

Wheeler has been releasing the next team on the list every day for almost a full month now. On Wednesday morning his list arrived at No. 4, where we find the Chicago Blackhawks. Here’s his top-level comment about the Blackhawks’ prospect pool:

The Blackhawks have made more than their allotted seven draft picks in each of the last five drafts and now have one of the deepest pools in the NHL to show for it. Their top 15 includes 15 players with actual NHL prospects, and three or four who didn’t make their list would have been in just about any other NHL team’s top 15. They don’t have a true star forward prospect coming behind Connor Bedard but they have three of the top D prospects in hockey, multiple other young D who’ve already played NHL games, and a ton of speed coming up front.

Here’s Wheeler’s criteria for inclusion in the list (it’s important because some of the Blackhawks named on his list are currently in the NHL):

To be considered a prospect, a skater must be under 23 years old and not established as a full-time NHL player with their club. The latter qualifier is the arbitrary section of the criteria. There, I trust my judgment for whether or not a rostered NHL player could still play games outside the NHL more than I trust any predetermined games-played cutoff. Preference for inclusion as an NHL prospect is more likely to be given to teenagers than 22-year-olds.

I will note that Wheeler had the Blackhawks at No. 7 on his previous edition of the list, so Chicago is moving up — even without being able to include Bedard.

Blackhawks Top Prospects

Here’s how Wheeler ranked the Blackhawks’ top 15 prospects:

Wheeler also mentioned Wyatt Kaiser, Nolan Allan, Adam Gajan, Gavin Hayes and Jack Pridham as being the 16-19 group of Blackhawks’ prospects. He also included Dominic James, Taige Harding, Aidan Thompson, Paul Ludwinski, Samuel Savoie and newly added Dmitri Kuzmin in his write-up.

Here are a few comments about specific prospects that got my attention:

Though his statistical profile doesn’t point to an NHL future, he’s a powerful and fast skater who can really impose himself north-south on games with his speed, physicality and strong 6-foot-3, 200-plus pound frame. He’s also very early in his skill development, didn’t make the full-time switch from football to hockey until he was in the OHL and never trained or spent his offseason on the ice until a couple of summers ago. As he plays catch-up with his peers in some of the finer skills, I expect him to build toward a potential role as a prototypical fourth-liner in time. He’s got a hard shot, does everything forcefully, plays in the guts of the ice, wins wall battles and is developing his hands and hockey sense. 

He’s got a pro frame, a once-lean build which he has now filled out (he’s now listed at 6-foot-1 and 195 pounds), a smooth and fast (though not necessarily explosive, he’s got very good speed for sure) skating stride and a well-rounded, always-in-the-mix game that gives him value on both special teams (he has been prolific on the power play in the USHL and the NCAA, and has penalty killed in both). 

[He] has really established himself as a strong two-way five-on-five defender and penalty killer and when his timing is on, he takes physically in the neutral zone (while also eliminating players from pucks along the boards, and in front of the net), kills a lot of plays and engages in all of the right ways.

He has developed a real assuredness and identity to his game and I think it might have moved his projection from a No. 6-7 to a No. 5. 

I’d be eager to work with him to build around the quickness and top-flight speed to try to him into a middle-six scoring winger. Not all of the Blackhawks’ abundance of 5-foot-9/10/11, speedy forwards are going to be able to play on the same team, so that may work against him at some point when guys like Nazar and Moore are a higher priority, but he looks like more like a high second-rounder than a third-rounder these days. If not for a couple of upper-body injuries last season, 50 goals and 90 points were within reach. And he’s going to sail past both of those marks this year.

He already possessed all of the tools he needed to become a top-pairing D, and he just keeps getting better and better. The decision-making is a little raw, but he’s very much still learning it in real time, and the raw tools are also incredibly appealing considering his relative inexperience all things considered. With continued fine-tuning, I believe there’s legitimate first-pairing upside there. I was very high on him coming into his draft year and he still exceeded my expectations with his ability to impact play all over the ice and jump in and out of plays. I expect him to do that in the NHL in a big way in time as well. He’s capable of becoming a force.

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