Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Time Is Now For The Chicago Blackhawks

04/12/2015 at 5:00pm EDT

from Mark Lazerus of the Chicago Sun-Times,

It’s coming. And everyone knows it’s coming. Another salary cap crunch, another painful summer, another retooling of the roster. Whenever this Blackhawks season comes to a close, whether it’s in two weeks or two months, it’ll mark the end of one chapter in team history, and the beginning of another....

“We know we have a good team here, and we’ve got a chance,” Marcus Kruger said. “And we want to take advantage of that. It’s not easy, and you don’t come around teams like this very often. We have a chance and we want to make the most of it, because you never know when this chance will come again.”

Whatever happens this summer, it won’t be as gutting as it was in 2010, when half the roster was lost. But it won’t be as mild as it was in 2013, when only role players such as Dave Bolland and Michael Frolik were moved. With the matching $10.5-million cap hits of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane kicking in, a lucrative new deal awaiting Brandon Saad, and a plunging Canadian dollar leaving little hope for a significant bump in the cap number, the future is uncertain for the Hawks beyond this postseason run, which begins Wednesday in Nashville.

Will Patrick Sharp be traded? Will Bryan Bickell be moved, too? Can the Hawks re-sign an important role player in Kruger? Johnny Oduya will be gone. So will Michal Rozsival and likely David Rundblad. Antoine Vermette, Andrew Desjardins and Kimmo Timonen are rentals. Brad Richards’ Hawks career was always likely going to be a one-and-done.

No matter what happens, next year’s lineup is likely going to include a lot of new, cheap faces, with rookies playing key roles at both forward and defense.

read on

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

From breaking news to in-depth stories around the league, KK Hockey is updated with fresh stories all day long and will bring you the latest news as quickly as possible.

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