The Chicago Blackhawks didn’t draft well in Montreal last time

The Chicago Blackhawks and the rest of the National Hockey League are getting ready for the 2022 NHL Draft. It is the biggest day on the calendar for teams trying their best to brighten their own future. This year’s edition will be held at the Bell Center in Montreal, Quebec.

The last time that the draft was held in this building was in 2009. It was a fantastic draft that had NHL All-Stars in it like John Tavares, Victor Hedman, Nazem Kadri, Chris Kreider, and Ryan O’Reilly amongst others.

Unfortunately, the Chicago Blackhawks had a terrible draft. They made 8 selections over the seven rounds and didn’t get a whole lot out of most of them. Between those eight players, they got 1036 NHL games played. You always want to get more than that.

The eight players taken were:

• Dylan Olsen
• Brandon Pirri
• Daniel Delisle
• Byron Froese
• Marcus Kruger
• David Pacan
• Paul Phillips
• David Gilbert

The Chicago Blackhawks didn’t really have a good showing at the ’09 NHL Draft.

About half of those games played in the NHL came from Marcus Kruger. He was a very nice depth piece on a Stanley Cup-winning team. In fact, his name is on the Stanley Cup twice. He was a very nice two-way forward to have on a fourth line for a long time. Kruger deserves a lot of credit for the way that he played.

Brandon Pirri was able to score some goals in the NHL for a while there but none of it really came with the Chicago Blackhawks as he bounced around a lot throughout his career. Outside of that, there isn’t much production from this group.

The biggest disappointment from this group has to be Dylan Olsen. He played in 28 games for Chicago where he collected one assist. After that, he was traded with Jimmy Hayes to the Florida Panthers in the deal that brought back Kris Versteeg.

Over his career, he played in a total of 124 games where he collected five goals and 17 assists for 22 points. That is not exactly what you need from your first-round picks. The Hawks were winning at the NHL level at this point so it wasn’t as important but they could have kept it going longer.

Since this draft, they haven’t really done a good job drafting overall at all. There were a couple of really nice picks in there but not enough to keep the run going beyond 2017. Now that the draft is in Montreal again this year, they are hoping for a different result this time around.