Kane trade in holding pattern
ANAHEIM, Calif. — With Jake McCabe and Sam Lafferty shipped out, the Blackhawks’ trade list is rapidly shrinking with four days left until the NHL deadline Friday.
But Patrick Kane still sits atop it, with his likely move to the Rangers on hold for at least a few more days. Hawks general manager Kyle Davidson declined to comment Monday when asked if Kane has officially waived his no-trade clause yet.
“[We’re] just in a holding pattern for now until things hopefully get to a conclusion,” Davidson said. “We’ll see where that goes.”
After Kane, though, Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou are the only others who have a decent-to-high probability of moving. Connor Murphy, Ian Mitchell and Taylor Raddysh are only outside possibilities.
Davidson somewhat downplayed the likelihood of even Domi and Athanasiou getting moved.
“[We’re] remaining open to any ideas that are thrown our way,” Davidson said. “We didn’t sign them just to be traded. We signed them because we liked them as players and we thought they could push a certain style of play, which they’ve done an excellent job at. It’s a business, so we have to do our due diligence. We’ll see what comes. But [there’s] nothing planned right now.”
One thing the Hawks are open to is helping out teams in tight salary-cap situations by taking on bad contracts for draft-pick compensation. They did that for the Senators with Nikita Zaitsev on Wednesday, and that might not be the only such move.
“You never know when something will come up, and we do have the space to act on something like that, so we’ll keep our options open,” Davidson said.
Patchwork lineup
The Hawks pieced together a full lineup for their game against the Ducks, but the result wasn’t exactly pretty in their 4-2 loss.
With Philipp Kurashev out because of illness and Kane back in Chicago, Brett Seney — he of the six career NHL goals — operated on the first line with Domi and Athanasiou. For the first defensive pair, Caleb Jones moved up into McCabe’s old role alongside brother Seth.
Jujhar Khaira (back) and Jarred Tinordi (sprained knee) returned from absences. And two of the recent trade acquisitions — defenseman Andreas Englund and forward Joey Anderson — flew into Anaheim and made their Hawks debuts.
“Seems to be a great group of guys here — they’ve been taking care of me for the hour and a half I’ve been here,” Englund said before the game with a touch of humor.
Richardson gave Englund a “few pointers” but mainly instructed him to direct his questions after his shifts to assistant coach Kevin Dean on the bench.