And now we wait...

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Can the Hawks find a way to keep Ladd?


In what was expected to be a pretty busy weekend for the Hawks, GM Stan Bowman was relatively quiet on the trade front, as much of the league was. There were not many deals done between GMs unless they involved draft pick swaps.

Which leads us to the draft. The Hawks made 5 selections in the first 2 rounds and the theme of the draft was taking big players with skill and who can skate. Chicago used their first selection on Kevin Hayes from Massachusetts high school at 24 overall. Other draft picks included Ludvig Rensfeldt (great name) from Sweden at pick 35, US-born defencemen Justin Holl and Stephen Johns at picks 54 and 60 respectively and goaltender Kent Simpson at pick 58. The Blackhawks also traded one of their second round picks for Jimmy Hayes (brother of first round pick Kevin) who was a 2009 2nd round selection of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I’ve seen these kids play or know how they are going to project in 3-5 years. That’s what makes the NHL draft such a crapshoot. The Hawks went into the weekend with the goal of further supplementing their pipeline of prospects and did achieve this. Only time will tell how these kids pan out and a key from this point on is the proper development. We’ll have to re-evaluate the 2010 draft in a couple years.

In the very least, Bowman now has additional ammo to make deals at the 2011 or 2012 trade deadline if the Hawks need to pick up additional pieces at the deadline to make a Cup run. You can never have enough good assets in your system.

As I mentioned above, it was surprising that there wasn’t another trade involving the Hawks this weekend. While Stan Bowman has indicated the Hawks do not have to make any more trades for salary cap reasons, it is unlikely that this is the case. Kris Versteeg and Andrew Ladd’s names were those most mentioned over the weekend.

News came out yesterday that the Hawks did indeed qualify key restricted free agents Niklas Hjalmarsson, Antii Niemi, and the aforementioned Andrew Ladd. While this doesn’t mean the players are going to sign these qualifying offers, it does ensure that the Hawks would receive compensation should another team sign them to an offer sheet. It also doesn’t prevent the Hawks from continuing to negotiate with their RFAs in order to sign them before July 1st.

So we now wait. Free agency opens on July 1st and while this is not exactly a bumper crop of unrestricted free agents, July 1st is going to mark a very important day for general managers. There’s a good chance a lot of these GMs are not going to get their UFA targets, meaning they will have to go the trade route to improve their team. I fully expect Stan to be a busy man in the next 2 weeks.

We will also soon know the answers to the questions that are unanswered at this time, such as what exactly the Hawks 2010-11 salary cap is after bonuses, and what it’s going to take to sign Hjalmarsson, Niemi and Ladd. It should still be a very interesting couple of weeks upcoming for the Stanley Cup Champs.