Seth Jones was the 532nd-best player in the National Hockey League last season. And the Blackhawks are about to make him the 15th highest-paid player.
Oh, and they gave up their most promising — and established — young defenseman in Adam Boqvist to get him. And moved back 20 draft slots in Friday’s first round. And gave up their first-round pick in next year’s supposedly stacked draft.
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All to a Columbus team that had very little leverage, that was selling low on a disgruntled player coming off a terrible season who wanted out, that had few trading partners with the kind of cap space to extend him.
Some rebuild, eh?
Quickly, the particulars: Stan Bowman swapped first-rounders in Friday’s draft (moving from No. 12 to No. 32) and gave up next year’s first-rounder (protected only if it’s a top-two pick) along with 2018 No. 8 pick Boqvist to the Blue Jackets for Jones and a sixth-rounder next season.
Jones is expected to sign an eight-year contract with a whopping $9.5 million cap hit on Wednesday (one year before the end of his current, manageable $5.4 million contract), which would put him behind only Erik Karlsson and Drew Doughty among NHL defensemen. (How are those contracts working out, by the way?)
It’s a monster of a deal and a monster of a gamble by Bowman, who’s already under intense scrutiny because of the far more serious allegations facing him and the franchise from one lawsuit alleging Blackhawks management failed to report claims that former video coach Brad Aldrich sexually assaulted two players in 2010, and another lawsuit alleging the Blackhawks provided Aldrich with positive references for future jobs, which led to the sexual assault of a minor in Michigan.
(For the purposes of this column, we’ll focus on the hockey, because the serious, real-world, human damage alleged in the lawsuits would obviously overshadow this otherwise. You can read the latest on the allegations here.)
The problem here isn’t that the Blackhawks acquired Jones. That part should absolutely be exciting for the Blackhawks and their fans. The problem is the price paid in the trade, and the extension that will follow.
Let’s start with the money. Eight years at $9.5 million? In this economy? With the salary cap likely to remain flat for the next couple of years, at least? When a former MVP like Taylor Hall — also coming off a down season — signed in Boston for four years at a $6 million cap hit an hour earlier? The Jones of 2017-18 was worth that money. The Jones of 2021 might be worth that money. Changes of scenery do sometimes make all the difference, but rather than wait to find out, Bowman is immediately handing Jones the keys to the franchise. It’s like the Richard Panik deal writ much larger — Panik famously told reporters he was stunned by how high Bowman’s first offer of two years, $5.6 million was during the summer of 2017, and jumped at the deal.
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Eight years, $9.5 million a year. Is that really the best the Blackhawks could do?
Yes, in two years, the twin $10.5 million cap hits of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane will come off the books, but it’s not as if Kane, still a world-class player, is going to be taking a huge pay cut on the next deal. For the 2022-23 season, the Blackhawks will have three of the top 15 cap hits in the league. Will they even be a top-15 team?
Now let’s look at the price paid just to be able to pay that price. Two first-rounders. Two! Both likely high ones, as few expect the Blackhawks to magically become a contender in the fall. Plus Boqvist, into whom the Blackhawks have poured three years of time and development, the No. 8 pick in the 2018 draft. Yes, there are concerns about Boqvist’s conditioning. Yes, his concussion history is worrying. Yes, he has yet to show those Karlsson-like offensive gifts we all expected. But he’s 20. Duncan Keith still had two AHL seasons ahead of him when he was 20. Cutting Boqvist loose is a huge risk. Cutting him loose along with two first-rounders is potentially catastrophic to a team that’s supposed to be rebuilding.
Look, Bowman always has been a go-for-it general manager. In the Stanley Cup years, draft picks were little more than bargaining chips to him. He frequently referred to prospects as “assets,” every player outside the core a potential future ex-Blackhawk. Who cared that in 2015 he gave up two second-rounders for a glorified team mascot in Kimmo Timonen, because he also turned a first-rounder into Antoine Vermette and the Blackhawks won their third Stanley Cup in six seasons. Nobody begrudged him tossing a first-rounder to Winnipeg for Andrew Ladd in 2016, because the Blackhawks were chasing yet another title. Even the now egregious-looking (and OK, even then-egregious-looking) deal that sent Phil Danault and a second-rounder to Montreal for Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann can be chalked up to hyper-aggression.
That’s what you want in your general manager, right? The guy who’s always going to go for it?
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Well, yeah, when the team is worthy of it.
Are these Blackhawks worthy? These Blackhawks who haven’t ended a season in a playoff spot in four years? These Blackhawks who are stuck with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, seemingly perpetually mired in the mushy middle of the league?
It’s perplexing, at the very least. Bowman had just miraculously moved Keith’s $5.538 million cap hit to Edmonton without having to retain any salary. The premature retirements of Brent Seabrook and Andrew Shaw gave the Blackhawks further cap flexibility, albeit with strings attached because it’s money that will be on long-term injured reserve. And just nine short months ago, the Blackhawks finally committed to a long-overdue rebuild, then followed through on it by throwing wave after wave of rookies into significant roles during the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season.
The Blackhawks were trusting the process. And it appeared to be paying off.
Then this.
With all the smoke surrounding a potential Jones trade, I asked Bowman on Thursday if his newfound cap space would prompt him to try to “expedite” the rebuild. To potentially skip some steps. I wanted to know if, rather than wait for Boqvist — or Ian Mitchell, or Wyatt Kalynuk, or Nicolas Beaudin, or anyone else — to develop into a true No. 1 defenseman, Bowman wanted to go shopping for one instead.
“If you have an opportunity to accelerate that progress, of course we want to do that,” he said. “We’ve been doing that over the last few months, having conversations, trying to see, ‘Is there a way to make this go quicker?’ The challenge there is, you don’t want to do things which are maybe irresponsible to just quicken the process.”
So that’s the big question. Was this trade — and the monster extension that came along with it — irresponsible? Of course, only time will tell.
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And let’s be fair here. Let’s take a step back and breathe for a moment.
Yes, Jones had a dreadful 2020-21 season — the 169th-best defenseman in the league, per GSVA (Game Score Value Added, a holistic metric calculated by The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn, and the stat that gave us the jarring first line of this column — but it remains to be seen how much stock we should put in such a bizarre anomaly of a season. Four years ago, Jones was the sixth-best defenseman in the league by GSVA, and looked like an imminent Norris Trophy winner. He was a star, a big, mobile, minutes-eating, two-way dynamo who had 16 goals and 41 assists in 78 games. An obvious franchise cornerstone.
And Bowman’s never been shy about his team-building philosophy. “You need stars,” he told me during the 2014-15 season. “The hardest thing to find in this league is true stars, guys who can lead and carry your team.”
It holds up. How many Cups would the Blackhawks have won without Toews and Kane, without Keith and Marian Hossa? It’s a team game, sure, but it’s the stars that put you over the top, as anyone who watched Nikita Kucherov and Andrei Vasilevskiy during Tampa Bay’s championship run this summer can attest.
Jones was a star. He’ll be 27 in October, so it’s unreasonable to say with any certainty that he can’t be one again. It’s even fair to say that Jones has a better chance of returning to stardom than Boqvist has of achieving stardom, just because Jones has proof of concept.
But it’s the sum total of the deal here that makes it so potentially disastrous. Two first-rounders (the No. 32 pick absolutely pales in terms of value to the No. 12) and a huge part of the future. Columbus reportedly asked for Kirby Dach and/or Alex DeBrincat as an opening overture, and Bowman was wise to label them untouchable. Last year’s first-rounder, Lukas Reichel, was a nonstarter, too. Boqvist should have been, as well. At the very least, it should have been Boqvist OR two first-rounders, certainly not Boqvist AND two first-rounders. Because what leverage did Columbus GM Jarmo Kekalainen have here?
Maybe Bowman comes out looking like a genius in the end. Maybe Jones, in a new city with new teammates (including younger brother Caleb, a fellow defenseman) thrives on the Blackhawks’ top pairing alongside Connor Murphy. Maybe Boqvist never becomes what he and the Blackhawks hoped he’d be. Maybe the No. 12 pick flames out, like so many do. Maybe Jones becomes Toews’ successor as team captain, brings the team back to prominence, and becomes a Chicago institution of his own. It’s entirely plausible. He was that good, and not that long ago.
Jones makes the Blackhawks better now. No doubt. The question is, will this deal make the Blackhawks better in the long run?
Because it feels like Chicago was in a bidding war against itself. And still somehow lost.
(Top photo: Jamie Sabau/NHLI via Getty Images)
