The Blackhawks began their expected offseason defensive overhaul Saturday by acquiring left-handed blueliner Olli Maatta from the Penguins.
Maatta, who turns 25 in August, brings six years of NHL experience — all with Pittsburgh — and an up-and-down track record to Chicago. The Penguins received center Dominik Kahun and a fifth-round pick, No. 151 overall, from the Hawks in exchange.
Maatta’s year-over-year inconsistency has never been starker than in the past two seasons.
In 2017-18, he played all 82 games, matched a career high (dating back to his 2013-14 rookie campaign) with 29 points, and served as an effective puck-moving defensemen in all three zones.
But in 2018-19, he missed nearly two months due to injury, recorded just 14 points and slipped tremendously in his own zone, ending up a healthy scratch for the final three games of the Penguins’ first-round sweep.
The Hawks are counting on a bounce-back 2019-20 season for Maatta, who has all the tools to be a reliable top-four defender when he’s on his game.
He has good size at 6-2, 206 pounds, and has been a positive possession player in four of his six seasons. He’s also signed for three more years at a roughly $4 million cap hit — almost exactly the same contract situation as Connor Murphy.
In other words, Maatta almost certainly won’t singlehandedly fix the team’s defensive struggles, but he will likely help.
Someone will need to head out to make room for him, though. The Hawks now have seven defensemen under contract, plus Gustav Forsling as a restricted free agent and Henri Jokiharju to fit into the NHL depth chart. That’s not going to fly, especially given the high likelihood of more additions on the way.
The handedness imbalance is telling of where those subtractions might be made. Maatta joins an oversized left-handed battalion that also includes Duncan Keith, Slater Koekkoek, Erik Gustafsson, Carl Dahlstrom and Forsling. The latter three each stand a chance of being moved.
Meanwhile, the Hawks will hope their two European signings earlier this spring — Anton Wedin and Dominik Kubalik — can offset the loss of Kahun, who was a reliable defensive forward in the bottom six last year and also quietly scored 37 points. Wedin especially plays a similar style.
