The end of a dynasty?

Now is the winter of our discontent. 
-- William Shakespeare, Richard III

Well, my Blackhawks won't be going to the playoffs this year.

The big trade didn't work out. Panarin had a far better year than Saad did. Jonathan Toews and Brent Seabrook and Duncan Keith had possibly the worst years of their careers. We should have hung on to Nikolas Hjalmarsson instead of trading him for Conor Murphy, a younger defenseman with potential but who just didn't fill his skates this year. Marian Hossa, our second-leading scorer,  missed the entire season due to his skin problem and may never play again. Our goalie, Corey Crawford, was having a career season- Vezina Trophy-caliber, in fact- but has been out most of the year with a mystery ailment rumored to be post-concussion syndrome.  His future is unclear.

I'm worried about Toews and Saad and Hossa and Crow most of all. It makes some sense at this point in their careers that Keith and Seabs should regress. Bad trades are bad trades; they happen, you suck them up, and try to recover from them, and try not to make any more. But the disappearances of those four key guys were killers. Whether we're able to come back from this next year depends to a great extent on whether Toews and Saad can find themselves and whether Hoss and Crow can come back and play at the level they did before.

Any way you look at it, we have some rebuilding to do. The Stanley Cup window looks like it's closed, but maybe not- and if it is, it's not clear for how long. As a couple of articles I've seen recently have pointed out, the Pens managed to come back again in only a few years after their window had seemingly closed. Detroit had an occasional down year during their long run. A great deal depends on what happens during the off-season.

It's not clear that GM Stan Bowman and/or Coach Joel Quenneville will be back. Not being in the dressing room, I'm not in a position to evaluate whether Coach Q has lost the team. I do know that he has to be regarded historically as by far the best coach the Hawks have ever had; with him at the helm, they won as many Stanley Cups as they had in the entire previous history of the team. Losing him would feel like an amputation. I can't claim the expertise to say whether a change is a good idea; I have no idea who might replace him, and my instinct is to hope he stays. Statistically, few coaches win Stanley Cups this late in their tenure, though, and it's possible that a change might do the team a world of good. I just don't know.

Bowman is working to make us younger and faster. That's good. While just about every trade he made this past off-season turned out to be a disaster, every one of them made sense at the time; I'm not sure whether we can hold them against him, or at least as much as we might have if they'd been Pulford-like obvious blunders. As one of the articles I posted today points out, this disastrous season was a perfect storm. A  bunch of things all happened at once, and not all of them were controllable. Again, Rocky has a tough call ahead of him. Maybe we could pry Doug Wilson away from the Sharks. Maybe there's somebody else out there who could do the job. Or maybe Stan deserves another chance; like I said, it's not as if the moves he made were obviously dumb ones, except in retrospect.

Antti Niemi is now, I believe, on his fourth team (Montreal) since leaving the Hawks. Chicago kid Scott Darling, who was our backup last year and was brilliant enough to earn a shot as a number one goalie in his own right,  has had a terrible season with the 'Canes, and especially if Crow's future and Darling's ongoing role in Carolina remain doubtful I can imagine him coming back. As hard as Hawk fans are inclined to be on Forsberg, he's a kid, a rookie- and I remember how badly Hall of Famer Eddie Belfour stunk when he first came up. The guy we just called up, J.P. Berube, has been around longer than Forsberg and other than one miserable season with the Isles he hasn't been terrible. But even if Crow comes back, it's clear that one way or another we have to be deeper in goal than we've been this year.

So I don't know. I'm disappointed, and I guess I'll be paying closer attention to spring training than usual. But I'm not ready to despair of my Hawks quite yet. The situation clearly isn't upbeat, and we've known all along that the run wasn't going to last forever. But I think we're kind of in the position of Hari Seldon in the "Foundation" books. We're facing a rough stretch, but perhaps with the right moves, it doesn't have to be all that long.

I'm not convinced that re-opening the window is impossible, maybe even as soon as next year. We still have the core. We have kids like Alex DeBrincat and John Hayden and Vinne Hinostrosa. We have an ownership that cares and wants to win and hires good people.  I don't think it's time to give up quite yet. It's not as if we'd been thrust back into the dark days of the Bill Wirtz- Bob Pulford era.