They definitely didn’t want or expect to be the 2nd worst team in the league last year, but they certainly weren’t ready to contend for the playoffs.

In theory it’s still early in the rebuild, most of their best prospects are either not here yet or are yet to play a full season’s worth of games (Frondell, Kantserov, Rinzel, Lardis, Moore, Nestrasil, Vanacker, Boisvert). And evidence of this still being earlier in the process than it feels like is that they have the #1 or #2 rated prospect pools in the NHL - the bulk of the team they’re building isn’t here yet or just got here.

It’s just frustrating that a tear down rebuild in hockey like this is a 6-7 year process. And there are no longer any good free agents in hockey, nor do teams need to unload salaries right now due to the rising cap. So the timing of the big cap increase was really bad for the Blackhawks, not only for those reasons but because Bedard and all other guys they want to re-sign will have to be signed at the new higher cap numbers. Whereas other teams have longer-term contracts locked in that were scaled to the old cap numbers.

I’m not sure if it’s going to work but I do think it’s generally going as planned to this point. This coming season will be the first one where the bulk of the roster will be made up by guys that actually matter for the future, so now we’ll really start to get answers. I do think they’ll still be bad but hopefully a lot of guys showing real promise.