Davidson, the Hawks’ interim GM since October, is expected to be named permanent GM on Tuesday, per reports.
The Blackhawks are expected to name Kyle Davidson their permanent general manager Tuesday.
Davidson — the Hawks’ interim GM since Stan Bowman’s exit in October — will become the 10th GM in franchise history and, at age 33, the youngest GM in the NHL. Frank Seravalli of the Daily Faceoff first reported the news Monday.
After a year of scandal, disgrace and exodus that decimated the Hawks’ off-ice reputation and esteem, dropping it to a level below even that of the poor on-ice product, Tuesday should represent the first significant, positive step forward into the next era of the franchise.
But one step forward unveils just how long and difficult the 1,000-step climb back to the mountaintop will be.
Davidson is a bold thinker who may well be equipped to handle the challenge, but he’ll be tested in his first couple years on the job arguably more than any of his nine Hawks GM predecessors ever were. Even with business president Jaime Faulkner and CEO Danny Wirtz taking the reins on the off-ice side, the team and hockey operations department Davidson inherits desperately needs almost as much of a makeover.
A former intern with the Hawks right out of college in 2010, Davidson — a native of Sudbury, Ontario, and graduate of Laurentian University in Ottawa — has gradually worked his way all the way up the organization’s hockey operations ladder over the past decade, eventually ascending to assistant GM in 2020.
His wide-ranging experience on the way up — from contract negotiations, to salary-cap management, to player scouting, to analytics — made him qualified for the interim GM job, and his experience gained over the past four months make him qualified for the permanent GM job.
But those things also make him technically an internal candidate, something that will make large portions of the Hawks’ already frustrated and jaded fan base even more skeptical of him. The same can be said about his relative youth, considering how disastrously the Hawks’ “young coach” experiment with Jeremy Colliton fared.
Davidson’s first challenge, starting Tuesday morning, will be to win over the fan base, and he’ll need to walk a delicate line to do so.
He’ll simultaneously need to establish his legitimacy and respectability, making fans believe in his ability to stand up to the other 31 GMs and successfully execute a vision for the team, while also showing off his personable side, relating to fans who felt ignored or demeaned by Bowman, ex-president John McDonough and their signature stubbornness and secrecy.
Behind the scenes, Davidson is a very different person with very different ideologies and traits than Bowman, but it’ll be important for him to publicly demonstrate that.
He’ll also need to show why he was the best choice for the job — over the six other external candidates with unique backgrounds the Hawks interviewed during their lengthy GM search. The Hawks ultimately rejected Cubs executive Jeff Greenberg, who would’ve been the most external, outside-the-box (although perhaps excessively so) choice possible, and Lightning executive Mathieu Darche, who would’ve brought experience from the NHL’s current model franchise, to keep him.
Davidson’s second challenge, starting perhaps as soon as Tuesday afternoon, will be to intensify trade negotiations in earnest ahead of the March 21 deadline.
The coming three weeks are a vital time for the Hawks to jumpstart their rebuild as quickly and aggressively as possible, because they can’t afford to waste time when the timeline back to contention already looks so lengthy.
In the short term, he’ll need to recoup as much value as possible for virtually anyone on the current roster with value, starting with pending free agents Marc-Andre Fleury, Calvin de Haan and Dominik Kubalik.
In the long term, he’ll need to reconstruct the team from scratch with only a few core players, an extremely defense-heavy prospect pipeline and no 2022 first-round draft pick with which to work. Kirby Dach will need a new contract this summer; Alex DeBrincat will need a new one in 2023. Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews’ current contracts coming off the books in 2023 — whether or not they’re re-signed — will free up tons of cap space, but responsibly converting that financial flexibility into equivalent talent will be no easy task.
And Davidson’s third challenge, starting not much later than Tuesday, will be to restructure and restaff the front office.
It has lost a great deal of experience — for better or worse — over the past couple years. And it’s not yet clear how he’ll want it to operate and who he’ll want advising him. He did hint in November, at his one previous news conference, that he privately holds some ideas.
“As I continue to evaluate and I get exposed to the different aspects of the organization, there’s definitely going to be some changes,” Davidson said then. “I have strong opinions on how certain things should run, how certain things should operate. So we’ll get into making those changes over time.”
Brian Campbell, the former Hawks defenseman who has bounced around between several front-office roles the past few years but is currently listed as a player development coach, will presumably take on one of the biggest roles beneath Davidson. Those two have been inseparable around the United Center, Fifth Third Arena and on road trips this winter.