Lazerus: Bill Zito’s Panthers, Kyle Davidson’s Blackhawks and the highway not taken | USAEMALL.com

It’s entirely possible that four or five summers from now, Connor Bedard’s name will be etched on the Stanley Cup.

He’ll have won the Conn Smythe Trophy that spring, of course, after a truly absurd playoff run flanked by Michael Misa and Frank Nazar, with Artyom Levshunov logging a heroic 30 minutes a night on the back end. Kevin Korchinski will have racked up the points as his partner on the top pair, with Sam Rinzel lighting it up, as well. Alex Vlasic’s work as the shutdown defender will be the stuff of legends. That second line of Nick Lardis, Sacha Boisvert and Oliver Moore will have made those Blackhawks matchup-proof, forcing opposing coaches to pick their poison.

And man, who’ll be able to forget the way Samuel Savoie, Landon Slaggert and Marek Vanacker wreaked havoc on the newly christened Hair on Fire line, bringing energy to the team and fans out of their seats?

It absolutely could happen.

Kyle Davidson is counting on it, staking his reputation on it, testing Chicago’s patience on it. Davidson sold Danny Wirtz on his plan to gut the franchise and rebuild it through the NHL Draft, and that’s exactly what Davidson has done.

Eight first-round picks in the last three seasons. Two more this year. Two more the year after that. It’ll always be an amusing footnote in Blackhawks history that Davidson’s tank failed but the ping-pong balls fell his way anyway, landing him the centerpiece in Bedard. The rest has been done with ruthlessness and a lack of sentimentality. Davidson has had as clear a vision as any general manager in the game, and he has stuck with it every step of the way.

This is how professional sports teams operate these days, especially in a salary-cap league. When things are going poorly, you blow it up and start over. That’s just how it works.

The thing is, it hasn’t worked. Not in the NHL. Not in the cap era. Not yet. The Buffalo Sabres blew it up, tried to tank for Connor McDavid, and are going to miss the playoffs for the 14th consecutive season. The Detroit Red Wings blew it up, built through the draft, made some savvy picks that have worked out well, and are scratching and clawing to be the eighth seed in the East after eight long seasons without a playoff appearance. The Edmonton Oilers picked No. 1 four times in five seasons and landed the most talented player the game has ever seen, and they didn’t reach true contention until last spring — a decade after drafting McDavid and 14 years after taking Taylor Hall.

And the Blackhawks, eight years removed from their last true playoff appearance, are still years away from the next one.

Saturday, Davidson traded one of his three best players, defenseman Seth Jones, to the Florida Panthers, because Jones couldn’t take the losing anymore. Davidson did relatively well in the deal — getting goaltender Spencer Knight and retaining only $2.5 million a year of Jones’ massive contract — but it was still yet another trade that made the Blackhawks demonstrably worse. Always one step forward, two steps back.

Now let’s look at the team that acquired Jones. When Bill Zito took over as GM in Florida, the Panthers were still something of a league laughingstock. They hadn’t won a playoff series in a quarter-century. The roster was loaded with mediocre players in their mid-to-late 20s. They were stuck.

Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito hoists the 2024 Stanley Cup. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

But Zito didn’t tear it down. He didn’t rebuild the Panthers. He remade them. He used every tool at his disposal — trades, free agency, the waiver wire — to reconstruct the plane while it was still in the air. Within four years, the Panthers were Stanley Cup champions, a model franchise, the envy of the league.

Look at how that championship team was built. Zito made one of the gutsiest trades in modern NHL history to land Matthew Tkachuk. He saw players who hadn’t yet reached their potential and got them, trading for Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett, Brandon Montour and Eetu Luostarinen. He made smart signings in free agency, inking Carter Verhaeghe, Evan Rodrigues and Oliver Ekman-Larsson. And he found gold on the waiver wire, picking up Gustav Forsling — cast off by the Vancouver Canucks, the Blackhawks and the Carolina Hurricanes — and watching him become one of the best defensemen in the league. He dealt away his first-round pick in 2022. And in 2023. And in 2024. And in 2025. And in 2026. The only key players who came through the draft were already there when he arrived: Aleksander Barkov (No. 2 in 2013), Aaron Ekblad (No. 1 in 2014) and Anton Lundell (No. 12 in 2020).

It certainly wasn’t easy, and there certainly was some luck involved. Surely, Zito didn’t see Forsling becoming the player he is. Nobody saw a 57-goal season from Reinhart coming after six unspectacular seasons in Buffalo. And he did all this with Sergei Bobrovsky’s $10 million cap hit weighing him down, an albatross that eventually took flight. What Zito did is incredibly difficult.

But what Davidson is doing might be even harder.

Davidson had his chance to do this more quickly, to spare the fans all this misery. The 2021-22 Blackhawks had a 23-year-old Alex DeBrincat and a 23-year-old Brandon Hagel. They had a 26-year-old Jones and a 24-year-old Dylan Strome. And they had Patrick Kane posting 92 points.

Now? DeBrincat is with the Detroit Red Wings, on the verge of his fourth 30-goal season. Hagel is with the Tampa Bay Lightning, a burgeoning superstar enjoying his second 30-goal season and first point-per-game campaign. Strome is with the Washington Capitals, riding shotgun to history as Alex Ovechkin’s center, with 59 points in 60 games. Kane, despite playing just 100 games, has more points over the last two seasons than every Blackhawks player other than Bedard.

That’s more than Florida had when Zito took over. But DeBrincat and Hagel were too old (despite being a year younger than Barkov and Ekblad when Zito took over). Bedard was too important. The draft was the only path forward. The teardown was the only way.

It’s facile, and perhaps folly, to point all this out in hindsight, of course. There’s a reason so few GMs are willing to be as bold as Zito has been. It usually ends in a firing. Had Davidson tried to retool around his young rising stars and Kane on the fly back then, it’s just as likely that the Blackhawks would be stuck in the mushy middle the past few years as in the Stanley Cup Final.

But either of those scenarios sounds pretty darn good compared to what the Blackhawks have been the last four years, what they’ll probably be the next few years, and what drove Jones out of the city he was so excited to come to in the first place.

What’s done is done, but it doesn’t have to stay this way. It’s long past time for Davidson to get aggressive, to start trying to win for real. Yes, he made a run at Jake Guentzel last summer, but he came up short. He somehow has to convince Mikko Rantanen or Mitch Marner this summer to sign up for seven years of playing with Bedard. Or go after Wyatt Johnston or Noah Dobson or Evan Bouchard with an offer sheet. Or package some of the myriad picks and prospects and young players he has amassed to land a ready-made rising star.

Or all of the above. It’s what Zito would do. It’s what Zito has done. It’s what works.

It’s time to get bold. It’s time to get creative. It’s time to start winning again. Because the current path is not just excruciating; it’s extremely unlikely to work. History has shown us that. And it’s better to aspire to be the Florida Panthers than risk becoming the Buffalo Sabres.

(Top photo of Seth Jones: Bill Smith / NHLI via Getty Images)