The 2023–2024 Blackhawks season has come to a close, and I think it is safe to say it went pretty much as we anticipated it going. The team will once again be drafting in the top four this June and will be adding another key piece for the future of this team. This was a season of low expectations, but to say that it was a complete failure of a season would be irresponsible to the rebuild and the positive steps this team took this past season. I wanted to take a look at a few players, not named Connor Bedard, who were pleasant surprises this past season and can’t help but make you excited for both the long-term and short-term future of this franchise.
Alex Vlasic
Coming into this season, the hype on the back end was all over Kevin Korchinski, which was well deserved considering the former 7th overall pick made this team as a 19-year-old. While everyone, me included, was talking about him, Vlasic was flying under the radar and establishing himself as a true top-two option for this Hawks team. The 22-year-old played in a career-high 76 games this season and had a season average of 21:29, which was good enough to put him second on the team. He did a great job establishing himself as a shutdown defensive defenseman and even showed great hockeyIQ and made smart decisions when it was time for him to step up and get involved on the offensive side of the puck. While this was just his first full season and he still needs more time to develop, he took massive steps in the right direction, and it's exciting to see how he will follow up next season.
Jason Dickinson
Dickinson has to be the leader right now in terms of the best moves made by Kyle Davidson in his brief run as Hawks GM. KD was able to pick up the former 1st round pick and a 2nd round pick in this year's draft from the Canucks for Riley Stillman. You look up fleeced in the dictionary, and these trade terms are shown as the definition. Jason was the only Hawk to play all 82 games this season; he was one of two Hawks who played more than 50 games to finish with a positive +/-, and he was tied for most goals with Bedard at 22. I think the most impressive thing about his season was the fact that out of his 22 goals, only two came on the power play. Meaning he was getting the job done at difficult times. With this great play this season, he earned himself a nice two-year, 8.5 million-dollar extension, and if he keeps this up, I think he can be a good fit to stay with this team long past that deal.
Petr Mrazek
Mrazek came to Chicago with absolutely zero expectations; he was brought in with a first-round pick so the Leafs could get some much-needed cap relief. It seemed like the once very promising career for this netminder was slowly disappearing with each injury that seemed to hit like clockwork every season. Putting a glorified AHL team in front of him this season was a safe bet; it was going to get very ugly for him going into his final year before free agency. Well, Petr wasn’t going down without a fight, and I think we can all agree that he won that fight. He was able to stay healthy the entire season and start in a career-high 53 games. While his record doesn’t show it (18-31-4), if it weren’t for his stellar play, this season could have been a hell of a lot worse. I lost count of the number of games that this team was in a winning position because of his play. He is by no means the long-term solution to the Hawks goaltending position, but he is a great option to carry the load until one of the prospects in Rockford is ready to take control.
Nick Foligno
This was a player that I wasn’t expecting to be talking about come the end of this season, but I am beyond happy with what he brought to this team. His numbers were about what you would expect for the role he was given coming into this season, finishing with 37 points (17-20). I don’t think anyone including him expected him to get as much ice time on the top line as he did, but when something works, you need to run with it. What he brings to this team off the ice is so damn valuable that KD locking him down for two years at $9 million is well worth the price. He brings a leadership role that this team desperately needed once it was decided that Toews was not coming back; he brings a great mentor role for Bedard and will help him be the leader that we all expect him to be; and he is helping establish what it is going to mean to be a Blackhawk going forward. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and he calls out what needs to be called out. He talked about how things need to change this summer, and after he spoke, you got the vibe that the guys who want to be here are falling in line with him and looking to him to lead them into the next season. 9 million is a lot of money for someone who will be 37 at the start of next season, but from where I’m sitting, he is well worth it.
While you can find positivity in a lot of the play from this team this season, for me personally, these were just a few that stuck out to me. In a season like this, you have to try and find the positives, so I would love to hear some of your half-full takes from this season.
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