Rozner: Can Blackhawks find enough pieces for Kane, Toews to make one more run?

Good luck choosing a lens through which to view the Blackhawks.

A reasonable person would say they won three Stanley Cups and had a coach who wouldn't want to be part of a rebuild, so they tried after 2015 to continue to win with spare parts around an aging core and squeeze out another title.

Most would suggest this was a logical approach and few would have embraced anything else.

But five seasons have passed since that victory over Tampa in the Stanley Cup Final.

They lost 4 games by a goal each in a seven-game series with St. Louis (2016), lost a four-game series to Nashville (2017) as the No. 1 seed in the West and will miss the playoffs for a third straight year.

Now, most want to burn the stadium down. So much for a reasonable view.

As we await the 2020-21 season, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews have three years left on their contracts, and the same is true for Duncan Keith.

Brent Seabrook has four years, Alex DeBrincat three and Brandon Saad has a year left.

So, one must ask, can you put enough around Kane and Toews in the next three years to make another run?

You would have to draft and trade well and play the kids every night, and that wasn't going to happen under Joel Quenneville.

So now what?

It would be advisable to pick a lane, but that's difficult to do when you have a pair of players who could still help get you where you want to go.

Can you tank and rebuild with them? Kane made it clear a few nights ago that he's not interested in that.

Tanking is also something they could have tried after losing half a roster to cap mismanagement in 2010. After an ugly 2011 and as late as 2012, it looked hopeless to many as they lost a tough series to Phoenix in the first round.

Instead, they found a way to put enough pieces around their best players to capture two more Cups.

Along came Saad, Andrew Shaw, Marcus Kruger, Nick Leddy and Teuvo Teravainen, and the trade for Johnny Oduya in 2012 provided another valuable piece.

Thus, two more rings.

Of course, they still had Keith and Seabrook in their prime, not to mention Marian Hossa, Patrick Sharp and Niklas Hjalmarsson, and they found a goalie in Corey Crawford who saved them twice.

Most of those things don't exist anymore.

So the question remains, do you move on from anyone who won't be here when they hope to win again?

Do you tank and hope the kids arrive in time to help Kane and Toews, who will be 34 and 35 when their contracts end in three years?

Or do you rebuild as they have, while also trying to make the playoffs?

In July 2018 at the Blackhawks Convention, having not won a playoff series in three years, I could not get GM Stan Bowman to put a label on what they were doing, no matter how many different ways I tried.

"We don't spend any time trying to characterize what it is," Bowman said then. "It doesn't help our team perform better if we have a really good title for it.

"It's not gonna make a difference what we call it. We've never once had a meeting where we discussed what to call it.

"If you look at Washington, all I remember from a year ago is everyone said their window was closed. They got beat three years in a row by the Penguins and they traded away some players and didn't make any additions to their team.

"And they won the Cup.

"Was their window open or closed? I would love someone to explain that one to me. It doesn't make sense the way the media portrayed their window."

So where are the Hawks two years later? Pretty much in the same place, trying to rebuild and make the playoffs at the same time, which is the essence of what Bowman told reporters in St. Louis Tuesday night.

"It's always a balance of the short term and the long term. You wish they were aligned together, where what you did to help your team in the short term also helped in the long term," Bowman said. "But that's not the way it works, because in order to help your team in the short term, you're usually expending assets."

As they did during the years in which they traded young players or picks to get veterans at the deadline.

"So when you try to do both, you can pull it off for a little bit, but eventually when you do it year after year after year, something has to change in order to get more of those assets," Bowman said Tuesday. "We were obviously a team that was up there for several years in a row.

"The one encouraging thing is just that Jonathan and Patrick are having really good years even though they're in their 30s. Usually, players as they get into their 30s, their performance starts to drop.

"We've seen the opposite. So I don't know if you can say for sure that they're not going to continue to improve.

"We have some young players on the way (and) we're trying to get some more. And when they start taking that step forward, hopefully our team can take a step forward."

That worked in the summer of 2012, when few believed in their 2013 chances.

The only certainty now is we are all - including Toews and Kane - eight years older.