Blackhawks are likely headed for another lost season

At first glance, and if you were only looking at the final score, it might be easy to look at the Chicago Blackhawks' 3-2 loss to the Florida Panthers on Tuesday night as a somewhat promising start to their 2025-26 season. They went into the home of the back-to-back Stanley Cup champions and gave them a fight. It was a one-goal game, and in theory one that could have gone either way. 

That would be a wildly optimistic view of the game. It would also be wildly inaccurate. If anything, it was another harsh reminder that this could be another long season for the Blackhawks as they continue their seemingly perpetual rebuild. 

Not only were the Blackhawks outshot by a 37-19 margin, the Panthers had 32 scoring chances to only 14 for Chicago during 5-on-5 play (38-20 in all situations), had 18 high-danger chances to only four for Chicago, and had more than 77% of the expected goals. The strong play of Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight is the only thing that kept this game close on the scoreboard. The actual pace of the game, and the play on the ice, was not. 

This was also a Florida team playing without its two best players in Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk due to injury. You do not want to overreact to just one game, but it continues to shows how far behind the top-tier teams the Blackhawks remain. 

The Blackhawks still do not have the players to compete

That is also a huge problem and calls the entire strategy of this rebuild into question. While there is a solid collection of young talent in place, including 2022 No. 1 overall pick Connor Bedard and young center Frank Nazar, the Blackhawks have not really done anything to start building around them and start complementing them. 

The centerpiece of this rebuild was supposed to be Bedard, and the Blackhawks gutted their roster for the 2021-22 season in an effort to position themselves for him at the top of the draft. When the lottery balls fell their way, it was a stroke of good fortune that should have kickstarted the rebuild. 

Bedard is now entering Year 3 of his career and the Blackhawks still seem as far away from contending as they did the year before he arrived. That is not an exaggeration, either. They won fewer games in the second year of his career than they did in the year they tanked to get him, and this offseason they did relatively little to add to the roster.

Their biggest offseason moves were bringing in Andre Burakovsky and Sam Lafferty, while signing some returning players like Knight and Ryan Donato to multi-year contract extensions. That is not enough. Especially when the Blackhawks are working on five consecutive non-playoff seasons, with only one playoff appearance in the past eight seasons.

Even that one playoff appearance over that time is misleading, because that came in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season when the league expanded the field to 24 teams. The Blackhawks were the 23rd-ranked team in the league. In a normal season, with a normal playoff format, they would not have even been close. 

It is especially not enough offseason movement when the Blackhawks still have more than $14M in unused salary-cap space and have almost nobody signed to long-term contracts. 

The Blackhawks like their farm system. They like their prospects. They like the young players. The problem is that simply throwing all of those young players into a consistently losing environment where they can not compete is not going to help anybody's development. Not their own individual development, certainly not the development of the organization.