CHICAGO — The Blackhawks lost 4-2 to the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night. The Blackhawks played well enough to win, but Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen made 35 saves to stymie them.
Yeah, OK, whatever.
Look, I’m not here to say the Blackhawks’ games this season are meaningless. They’re not. It’s good for fans if the Blackhawks are competitive (and, uh, watchable, in all senses of the word). It’s good for Connor Bedard to have linemates that can keep up with him. It’s good for many of the younger prospects to over-ripen in Rockford rather than languish in a league for which they’re not quite ready. And it’s important for third-year coach Luke Richardson to show that he can build a structured, capable team now that he has a roster full of NHL-caliber players. In the small picture and in the big picture, these games carry some weight.
But a few years from now, when the Blackhawks are (possibly) back in Stanley Cup contention, nobody’s going to care who won a mid-October game against the Buffalo Sabres back in 2024. What matters more than anything else is the way the Blackhawks manage and develop and bring along their younger players, both in Rockford and in Chicago.
And they’re doing a truly terrible job of it with Lukas Reichel.
Reichel, the supremely gifted and supremely frustrating former first-round pick is so deep in the doghouse, that he’s finding “help” messages scrawled on the wall by Brandon Pirri and Jeremy Morin. But at least when those guys were getting buried by Joel Quenneville, the Blackhawks were contending for championships and didn’t have the time and space for wildly inconsistent young talents.
These Blackhawks should have all the time in the world for one.
Reichel played 90 seconds in the first period Saturday night. He played those 90 seconds on the fourth line. He was on the fourth line on Thursday, too, playing all of 8 minutes, 31 seconds. He was a healthy scratch for the entire four-game, season-opening road trip.
Yeah, that’ll get him going.
Richardson and the Blackhawks clearly don’t know what to do with Reichel. He can’t go to Rockford, because 22-year-old players with his pedigree don’t make it through waivers. It’d be foolish (albeit merciful) to sell low on him and make a “change of scenery” trade, because he’s signed on the cheap for the next two years and, again, is just 22. And Richardson will only use him in a bottom-six role because he clearly doesn’t trust him.
So all the while, Reichel sits there, waiting for a shift that may or may not ever come, not getting better, not providing any answers. He can’t regain the form that made him such an exciting young prospect late in the 2022-23 season, when he had seven goals and eight assists in 23 games. And he can’t play himself out of the league or into serious trade consideration if he’s getting eight minutes every five games.
The solution here is clear: Give the kid a run. A long run. Put him in a top-six role with top-six linemates and leave him there for a month, for two months, for half the season. Leave him there when he has a bad night. Leave him there when he’s mired in a slump. Leave him there, no matter what, and learn who he is. Because you learn nothing by having him play with grinders. You learn nothing by having him play three shifts in a period.
Nick Foligno brings a lot to Bedard’s line in terms of toughness and sneaky skill, but he’s not a top-line player at this stage of his career. Put Taylor Hall or Tyler Bertuzzi there, and give Reichel the open spot next to Philipp Kurashev on the second line. Then leave him there. That’ll let Foligno and Dickinson recapture the excellent two-way chemistry they had all last season, and it’ll allow Reichel time to prove what he can — or can’t — be.
It’s the only solution here. At least, the only logical one.
Reichel did get a brief shot with Bedard and Philipp Kurashev last season, but his most frequent linemate was MacKenzie Entwistle. He spent more time with Taylor Raddysh, Ryan Donato, Cole Guttman and Tyler Johnson than he did with Bedard or Kurashev. Richardson’s argument was always the same: He wanted to see more fight and heart and hustle out of Reichel, and putting him with scrappy, gritty players was his way of doing it.
Didn’t work. Reichel just receded further and further into his own head, and his confidence and production never recovered. The fact is, Reichel isn’t a scrappy, gritty player. He’s a scorer. A playmaker. He needs to play with scorers, with playmakers. That doesn’t have to be a mark against him.
Here’s an SAT analogy for you: Richardson is to Reichel as Jeremy Colliton is to?
You guessed it: Dylan Strome. Colliton never trusted Strome — didn’t trust his skating, didn’t trust his defense. So he kept trying to force a square peg into a round hole by putting Strome in the bottom six. It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t pay off. Strome was a playmaker, a guy who could keep up with the likes of Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat. And sure enough, when the Blackhawks finally gave up on Strome, he went to Washington and became the Capitals’ No. 1 center, posting back-to-back career years. When Alex Ovechkin finally breaks Wayne Gretzky’s record, Strome will probably have an assist on it.
Is Reichel at Strome’s level? He’s certainly faster. Certainly a better defender. Does he have Strome’s puck skills? Can he make plays the way Strome does? Don’t know. Why don’t we find out?
The irony here is that, for whatever reason, that 90-second first period did seem to get Reichel going. He had a tremendous second period, despite getting all of three minutes, three seconds of ice time, setting up two Craig Smith goals to erase an early 2-0 deficit. He was all over the ice and made a strong pass on the first Smith goal and created a turnover and got off a shot that led directly to the second Smith goal.
Looked like a player the Blackhawks might want to play more, no? If he can do that with Smith in three minutes, imagine what he could do with Bedard, or Kurashev, or Hall, or Bertuzzi in 20?
This is a transition year for the Blackhawks, a bridge from the tank years to whatever comes next. This is the year to find out who’s going to be a part of this thing going forward, and who’s not. Bedard and Alex Vlasic are etched in stone. Wyatt Kaiser is looking like a piece of the puzzle. Frank Nazar, Oliver Moore and Sam Rinzel should be here by the end of the season. Reichel remains the mystery — the tantalizing, infuriating, exciting, exhausting mystery.
Whether the Blackhawks finish with 65 or 75 or 85 points this season doesn’t really matter much in the big picture, in Kyle Davidson’s grand plan. Saturday’s loss doesn’t matter much. Reichel does. The Blackhawks need an answer on him. They need to know if he’s the dynamic future star we saw two years ago, or the timid, easily rattled confidence case he was last season.
There’s only one way to find out. And this — whatever this is — isn’t it.
(Top photo: Chase Agnello-Dean/NHLI via Getty Images)
