BUFFALO, N.Y. — Dylan Cozens was as clueless as the rest of us. He knew Jack Hughes was going first to the Devils. He knew Kaapo Kakko was going second to the Rangers. After that?
Nobody knew anything.
At the 2019 NHL Draft, all eyes were on Stan Bowman and the Chicago Blackhawks, who held the No. 3 pick and the key to the rest of the first round, thanks to their first draft-lottery win since they took Patrick Kane in 2007. There were about a dozen players that seemingly could have gone in just about any order from Nos. 3-14. Cozens was one of them, and, honestly?
He thought he might have been headed to Chicago.
“I thought I had a pretty good chance of going there,” Cozens said. “Once that didn’t happen, there were a bunch of different teams it could be. I had no clue where I was gonna go.”
Bowen Byram was in a slightly different situation. All the centers, including Cozens, were sort of bunched together. But Byram was the consensus top defenseman on the board. The prevailing wisdom in Chicago at the time was the Blackhawks were torn between Byram and center Alex Turcotte.
Byram wasn’t buying it, though.
“I didn’t really know, but I had a gut feeling that I wasn’t going to end up there,” Byram said. “I don’t know why, just an instinctual thing.”
His instincts were spot-on. Chicago ended up taking Kirby Dach, a bit of a surprise pick. We all know what happened from there. Dach was rushed into the NHL, then broke his wrist when he was loaned to the Canadian World Juniors team, never seemed to fully recover as his development plateaued, and was traded to Montreal at the 2022 draft for a pick that became Frank Nazar. The tank for Connor Bedard was on.
It’s easy to look at that 2019 draft as a fulcrum point for the Blackhawks as a franchise. What if they had drafted Cozens, who scored 31 goals in his second full NHL season with the Sabres? What if they had taken winger Matt Boldy, already an elite two-way winger with the Wild who could be in Team USA’s top six at the 4 Nations Face-Off? What if they had taken Byram (who played a key role in helping Colorado win the Stanley Cup in his second season) or Moritz Seider (who seemed like a huge reach at the time by Detroit but ended up being one of the best NHLers from that draft class) and had a more dynamic blue line almost instantly?
How different might the Blackhawks look right now had that 2019 draft gone differently? Are Alex DeBrincat, Dylan Strome and Patrick Kane still on the top line? Are the Blackhawks still annual players in the free-agent market? Yes, Connor Bedard is in another jersey, but are those alternate-reality Blackhawks a playoff team? Are they a contender?
Sure. Maybe. Probably not. But who knows? A squandered No. 3 pick is a significant sliding-doors moment for any franchise. Maybe it was for the Blackhawks.
Then again, the Buffalo Sabres now have three of those guys who were in the mix in the 2019 draft — Cozens, Byram and Peyton Krebs. And look how well things are going for them — staring down a 14th straight season without a playoff berth, too young to tear it all down, too mediocre to win the lottery, too hopeless to see any sort of light at the end of this endless dark tunnel. As bad as things are for the Blackhawks right now — and, oof, are they bad, as Friday night’s putrid 6-2 loss to those Sabres illustrated — you’d probably rather be in their situation than Buffalo’s right now. The Sabres know what they have and know that it’s not good enough. The Blackhawks are still holding a whole bunch of scratch-offs, hoping to cash in on a few of them.
The Sabres are a sobering reminder that while tanking might be all the rage in pro sports — thanks for that, by the way, Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs — it’s yet to actually work in the NHL in the salary-cap era. The Edmonton Oilers won the draft lottery three times in a six-year span, took the most talented hockey player ever to live in 2015, and didn’t win a conference-final game until this past spring, when they went on to lose in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final in Connor McDavid’s ninth season. The Detroit Red Wings are going to miss the playoffs for the ninth straight year and just fired their coach, Derek Lalonde, as even the Detroit faithful are finally starting to turn on Steve Yzerman’s endless Yzerplan.
And the Blackhawks are seven years removed from their last real playoff appearance, and are likely several years away from their next one.
Any time a team is stuck in mediocrity, you hear the same calls to “blow it up!” and “tear it down!” and “build through the draft!” But there’s no evidence that such a plan can work in the modern-day NHL. All you get is young players losing an awful lot of games, developing losing habits in a losing culture, and failing to realize their potential. You get the Buffalo Sabres. You get the Detroit Red Wings.
More than five years later, Cozens looks back on the 2019 draft and calls it “one of the best days of my life,” saying he’s “happy how it turned out.” Byram thinks back on it and is “grateful” that he went to such a good team in Colorado, and had a chance to win right away. Perhaps someday in the future, the Blackhawks can look back at it and say that draft — botched as it seems with the unerring clarity of hindsight — was the genesis of the next great Blackhawks team, because it eventually led to Bedard and Nazar, the No. 1 and No. 2 centers of a future Stanley Cup champion.
Because maybe Nazar will be everything the Blackhawks hope he can be. Maybe Kevin Korchinski will, too. And Artyom Levshunov. And Oliver Moore. And Sam Rinzel. And on and on and on. Or maybe just a few of them will, and that’ll be enough to build a winner around. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Or maybe they’ll turn out like so many of those guys taken in the 2019 draft. Maybe they’ll turn out just OK. Maybe they’ll underachieve. Maybe they’ll be steeped in a losing culture. Maybe they’ll go nowhere.
Maybe they’ll be the next Buffalo Sabres.
Friday’s game was a cathartic one for a Sabres team and fan base that had nearly reached its boiling point just a few days earlier. The Blackhawks put forth one of their worst efforts of the season — and that’s saying something — in falling behind 4-0 in the first period. Because of the three-day Christmas break, the Blackhawks had to fly to Buffalo early in the morning to make their morning skate, and a few of the players mentioned after that skate feeling off from the pre-dawn wakeup.
But that doesn’t excuse giving up three goals before getting their first shot on goal, more than 17 minutes into the game.
“No, we’re not going to talk about that,” Seth Jones said of the long day. “We didn’t come ready to play today and it obviously showed right from the start.”
The Blackhawks were caught flat-footed repeatedly, lost seemingly every puck battle and barely hit anybody all game, save for a Nick Foligno annihilation of Jiri Kulich in the second period. They didn’t give Petr Mrázek a chance in goal (four goals on 11 shots). And they were pretty well disgusted with themselves about it. Taylor Hall pointed to a bunch of nationally televised games coming up, including the Winter Classic at Wrigley Field on New Year’s Eve, and said the Blackhawks have to pull themselves together in a hurry.
“We didn’t make them battle, we didn’t make them fight for any of their chances,” Hall said. “It’s just really disappointing after a break. Everyone should be mentally fresh. Hopefully this can be a turning point for us, because that was ugly.”
The Blackhawks did make a game of it briefly, with Tyler Bertuzzi scoring late in the second and Jones scoring early in the third. A power play after that gave Chicago a chance, but Alex Tuch scored the second of his three goals right out of the box, a backbreaker.
“We definitely had energy down 4-2, but that’s not really the point,” Jones said. “The point is why we’re down 4-0 after the first.”
(Top photo of Ryan Donato and Dylan Cozens: Bill Wippert / NHLI via Getty Images)
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