COACH’S CHALLENGE: LIFT HAWKS UP WHILE LOSING
General manager Kyle Davidson won’t have an easy job during the Blackhawks’ rebuild, but he’ll have a straightforward one: making the moves he believes will help the team contend again.
Luke Richardson’s job will be neither easy nor straightforward as the new head coach.
When the ex-Canadiens assistant assumes his duties in Chicago next week, he’ll address reporters and fans for the first of many times ahead. When training camp begins in September, he’ll begin daily conversations with what likely will be a ragtag group of players.
Each and every time, Richardson will need to find and maintain a delicate balance between realism and optimism, accountability and flexibility, and transparency and subtlety.
To be fair, every NHL coach must do that — balancing honest criticism with loyal support for players — but the challenge is particularly steep during a rebuild as drastic as the one the Hawks are starting.
That’s because their on-ice objective, for 2022-23 and possibly 2023-24, will be tanking to maximize their draft picks. Davidson might not explicitly say that, but he’s not the type to totally lie about it, either. As the man in charge, he doesn’t need to.
But in the locker room and behind the lectern at news conferences, Richardson will need to operate with more caution and nuance.
Every game, he’ll be trying to help a builtto-lose team win — failing most of the time. He’ll need to accept that losing is inevitable while not embracing losing or perpetuating a losing culture. And he’ll need to impart the same mentality on his players without damaging their morale or stunting their development — the two things most important in the short term.
It’s going to be complicated.
The hockey trope “We have the guys we need to succeed” won’t be usable. There will be no preseason talk of playoff aspirations, nor any midseason talk of being “one winning streak away.” Avoiding those clichés will require pragmatism about the state of the Hawks’ roster and their severe shortcomings in talent, depth, experience, goaltending and just about every other category. But that pragmatism will need to stop short of bashing or belittling the team or undermining the confidence of the players.
That would defeat some of the purpose of the rebuild. A second line of Lukas Reichel, Taylor Raddysh and Philipp Kurashev — or whomever it ends up being — won’t be so good this coming season, but it could be good in a few years if those players continue improving even while they’re temporarily struggling.
Derek King, the Hawks’ interim coach this past season, did an admirable job of striking the right balances. But he also had some missteps, such as when, in April, he described his players as “drained” and later called for more veteran additions.
Richardson will be asked to do even better than King, for far longer, with an even worse team. He may benefit from the lack of pressure and expectations. But this job will not be simple.