Henri Jokiharju’s promising but possibly ill-timed tenure as the Blackhawks’ top defensive prospect ended in abrupt fashion Tuesday.
The 2017 first-round pick was shipped to the Sabres in exchange for winger Alex Nylander, the Sabres’ 2016 first-round pick.
Nylander was the eighth overall selection in his draft year and remains on the young end of 21 years old, but has yet to break through in three professional seasons to date. Nylander has appeared in just 19 NHL games, scoring three goals and three assists, and recorded decent but unremarkable production at the AHL level, as well.
He remains valuable, and he adds valuable upside to an otherwise below-average Hawks prospect forward pipeline — Kirby Dach notwithstanding — but it’s difficult to see his value as equivalent to Jokiharju.
The Finnish blueliner showed great potential in 38 NHL games last season, a rare and exceptional feat for a defenseman who was only 19 at the time. He graded excellently in the analytics category, leading all team defensemen in Corsi rating (54.1) and scoring chance percentage (51.9), and tallied 12 assists.
But with eight defensemen on one-way contracts following the acquisitions of Calvin de Haan and Olli Maatta earlier this offseason, and a number of high-pedigree D prospects —including fellow first-rounders Adam Boqvist and Nicolas Beaudin — coming up through the system, Jokiharju was caught in a disadvantageous spot.
The Tuesday trade solves that problem, but gives the Hawks an almost certainly lower-value player in return.
Nylander has two years left on his entry-level contract with a negligible $863,333 cap hit, and will compete for a spot on the Hawks’ roster come September training camp.
The range of potential outcomes is wide.
If he breaks through the taxi squad ceiling this year, he could possibly even land on the wing alongside Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews — a spot where other relatively unqualified candidates like Dylan Sikura and Dominik Kubalik have been tentatively penciled into. That could launch Nylander into the star playmaking winger he was once thought certain to become.
But if he continues on at the same middling level of development, his inability to secure a full-time NHL spot on the Sabres’ weaker roster is a bad sign. In that case, Nylander could be stuck in Rockford for most of the season — a discouraging trend after three years of doing the exact same thing.
