The Chicago Blackhawks are in a bad spot because of this trade

The Chicago Blackhawks are not a very good hockey team. They currently sit in 7th place of the NHL’s Central Division with a 26-41-22 record. They only have four more wins than the last-place Arizona Coyotes and one of those wins came against them on Wednesday night in overtime.

The Blackhawks have seen players like Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat have good seasons while they traded away other good players like Brandon Hagel and Marc-Andre Fleury. Outside of those individual performances, this team has mostly underperformed badly.

They aren’t very set up for the future either. The Hawks do not have a very good pool of prospects and they are abysmal at the NHL level. It is going to take a long time to get those things sorted out as they need to make good trades and draft selections.

It is going to be hard to do that right now because of a trade that they made during the last offseason. With the hopes of turning things around this year, they acquired Seth Jones from the Columbus Blue Jackets. In order to land him, they had to part with their first-round pick for this upcoming draft.

The Chicago Blackhawks should not have made the trade for Seth Jones.

The pick is top-two protected which means that if the Hawks win the lottery, they will get to keep it and their 2023 pick will move to Columbus instead. That is an issue too though because that draft is much better and the Hawks will be equally as bad if not worse in 2022-23.

Hindsight is the reason this trade has them in a bad spot because it did seem like a good move when it first happened but that doesn’t make it better. If they were good, it would be awesome having Seth Jones on the team.

None of this is Jones’ fault. He has five goals and 45 assists for 50 points in 73 games. That is pretty awesome for a defenseman on a bad team. His defense hasn’t been outstanding but the team as a whole struggle in that department a lot.

Another problem with the move for the Hawks is that next year, they begin paying Seth Jones an average annual value of 9.5 million dollars for eight seasons. That is a tough cap hit for a team that absolutely needs to rebuild. If they could trade him right now, they probably would.

If you are kicking in a fresh eight-year deal for a defenseman at 9.5 million per with no first-round pick in the draft, you better be at least a playoff contender but you should probably be Stanley Cup good. Instead, the Hawks are a lottery team and nothing more. It is going to be hard to claw their way out of this one.