Stan Bowman seemed excited at Blackhawks Convention late last month for one reason — August, his singular month of endless golfing, was right around the corner.
It has likely been a par-laden past couple weeks for the Hawks general manager, but he apparently stepped off the links Tuesday to toss another player into the Hawks’ defensive pressure cooker.
Philip Holm, a 27-year-old Swedish journeyman defenseman, signed a one-year, two-way contract with a $700,000 cap hit.
He becomes the Hawks’ 46th contract (against the limit of 50) for the 2019-20 season, 15 of which are defenseman — and almost all 15 of those will enter training camp in September with a viable shot at an NHL job.
Holm has only previously played one season, 2017-18, in North America, but it was a solid one. He scored 12 goals and 38 points from the blue line in 62 AHL games — 21 of which came with the Wolves — and also made his NHL debut, appearing in one game for the Canucks.
He then spent last season as the top-scoring defenseman for the Russian club Nizhny Novgorod, tallying 26 points in 61 games.
A native of Stockholm, Holm should fit in well socially among the Hawks’ heavily Swedish defensive corps — Erik Gustafsson, Carl Dahlstrom, top prospect Adam Boqvist and minor-leaguer Lucas Carlsson are all countrymen.
But if anything, Holm’s addition will only make things more complicated in the group’s collective fight for the six or seven opening-night roster spots.
Dahlstrom and Slater Koekkoek, even on one-way contracts, were already looking like odd men out prior to Tuesday, notwithstanding young Boqvist’s very legitimate NHL aspirations of his own. Holm certainly won’t enter the preseason with high odds of sticking with the Hawks, but his impressive track record in other leagues indicates some possibility.
