Rozner: Tightrope walk familiar for Blackhawks' Bowman

It would be nice to have four balanced lines.

It would be great to have battle-tested, veteran scorers playing throughout the lineup, especially on the top line.

And it would be comforting to retain all your best players, year after year, season after season, as you make a Stanley Cup run every spring.

But that's a fantasy world in which the Blackhawks can't operate.

The NHL has a hard cap, period.

There are few tricks and little chance to game the system. It was Gary Bettman's dream to have a league in which the best teams were continually punished for success, and he couldn't be happier that the Hawks must shed good players every summer, thus bringing them back to the pack regardless of whether they win a title.

What's laughable is the panic every Groundhog Day, when there's a sudden realization that the Hawks have holes.

No kidding.

When you pay a huge percentage of your cap to so few players, there is going to be a challenge every season.

"The difference this year is we're going to have some improvements from within," Hawks GM Stan Bowman said Tuesday night at UC, where the Hawks fell to the Lightning. "Relative to the last couple years, we didn't have a lot of young players in the lineup.

"We have a lot in our lineup this year and the difference between those guys and veteran players is they get a lot better during the year. They're different players in March than they are in October.

"Ryan Hartman, Michal Kempny, Vinnie Hinostroza, Tyler Motte, Nick Schmaltz, Gustav Forsling, there's six guys right there that have the potential to be better when we get to the trade deadline just because they're more comfortable. They've never been through this before.

"I do see more improvement from within than a year or two years ago."

Given the circumstances, the Hawks must draft well, develop wisely and insert young players into the lineup annually. These kids have to become serious contributors or the Hawks can't succeed.

And, of course, as soon as the kids start playing well, they need to get paid and there's no room left for them, so you lose Brandon Saad, Andrew Shaw, Teuvo Teravainen, Michael Frolik, Nick Leddy and Dustin Byfuglien, to name just a few.

It's enough to make a GM cry. Well, some GMs.

"That doesn't bother me at all. I actually look at it as a challenge," Bowman said. "We're having meetings right now. We're looking a year, two years, three years down the road.

"Who's the next player who's going to become a household name? I get excited about that. We've got some guys right here who could be right under our noses that have played half a year. That next star could be here right now, and there's another wave coming in a year or two.

"If you get stuck in that mode, maybe you would feel depressed or frustrated. I don't at all."

Most years at the trade deadline, more young players and picks are sent away in attempt to fill holes, often players fans hate to see leave just as they're establishing themselves.

"There's always the allure of getting someone else who's going to be the perfect fit, but it might not be that," Bowman said of the trade deadline. "The good thing about Joel (Quenneville) is he has a great feel for how to move those things around.

"What seems like an automatic today might not be a month from now, or two months from now. Joel might find a new combo that works great. That's happened in all of our playoff runs. Joel has found new lines we never thought of before.

"We've been going along half the year here with Hartman (alongside Jonathan Toews). Vinnie has done some of it. We've won a lot of games with those guys on that line."

This is an annual - if not eternal - Catch-22 which can't possibly be a surprise to anyone, yet every year the same panic sets in and the streets run red with anger when the Hawks don't have a perfect lineup.

Sorry, not possible, not when you pay to keep Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Corey Crawford, Artemi Panarin and Brent Seabrook.

But if you're trying to win the Stanley Cup every year, which is the reason you signed your best players for so much money, then you usually pay a price at the deadline in order to make another run.

See where we're going here?

The Hawks don't get everything right. They make mistakes. But given their cap constraints, they are walking a tightrope each season, jumping on a merry-go-round every summer.

The point is this is what they are, this is what they have been for eight years and this is what they will be, unless they start breaking up the core to create more cap space.

Nothing about it is new, yet the roster frustration begins anew each winter and boils over in the spring.

Only the occasional Stanley Cup victory changes that.

brozner@dailyherald.com

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