April 13--Hours before the Chicago Blackhawks began defense of their Stanley Cup championship with Game 1 of the Western Conference quarterfinals against the St. Louis Blues on Wednesday at Scottrade Center, general manager Stan Bowman met with the media and discussed a variety of subjects. Here are some of them:
Here are some of them.
Do you look at rookie Artemi Panarin reaching bonuses of $2.75 million that will count against next season's salary cap as a good thing or bad?
I'm very happy for Artemi. I think first and foremost, what a performance by him to come in and do what he did as a first-year player. It's always sort of puzzled me why people look at that as a bad thing. He's come in and done something that's maybe not unheard of but certainly you haven't seen a first-year player come in and finish that high in the standings for points. And also, you look at the impact he had on our team, we wouldn't be where we are today without his contributions.
(With) the bonuses ... we always find a way to make that work in the summertime. That's not the focus right now. But I couldn't be happier for him. He came in here, he took a chance on us. He had a lot of options. I think we owed it to him to put him in the best position to succeed and you could tell from the beginning of the season when he scored the first goal in the first game there for our team and there was some magic all year long.
How do you rate the impacts newcomers such as Andrew Ladd, Tomas Fleischmann and Dale Weise have made?
The one thing I tried to caution everyone is things just kind of flow differently in terms of their roles that they fit into and the importance of one game versus a series of games. As I look at the players we've brought in I think the one that may have had the easiest transition was obviously Andrew Ladd. He's fit right in with us. He's been here before so not only did he know our coaching staff but he knew the players and he understands the style we play. For other players it sometimes takes a little bit longer to feel comfortable. I guess the way I would explain it is it's hard to play hockey when you're doing a lot of thinking. It's such a quick game that you have to play sort of just on instinct and when you haven't been with us before it takes time to build that instinct. I think we're seeing the other guys work through that and as we go along here we'll see even bigger contributions.
How do you view Bryan Bickell's situation with the Hawks moving forward?
'Bicks' has had some tremendous runs with us, in particular in the playoffs. So I think this is really his time of year. Things change quickly, whether it's injuries or whether it's situations in a series. Coach (Joel Quenneville) might be looking for something different. The lineup in Game 1 of the playoffs is not the same as you move along, and things can change. In the meantime, we want Bryan to keep playing. I think that was the goal. He wasn't playing a lot earlier in the year when he was up here. For whatever reason it wasn't clicking for him. I give Bryan credit for going to Rockford and doing his job and continuing to get the repetitions and building on his confidence. I know that when his name is called, he'll be ready.
How are you going to fit restricted free agent Andrew Shaw into the cap moving forward?
Andrew's a big part of this team and he has been for the last few years. He came in as a young player and made an impact with us right away. Whenever we get these questions on the salary cap, it's sort of a broken record, but we'll just see where it's at. I don't know what the cap is going to be until we know what it is, so ... I don't have a whole lot of value in doing speculating. We do a lot of planning internally, but until then number is actually out, then I can answer that better."
As an NHL GM, you have a vote for the Vezina Trophy (awarded to the league's top goaltender). Will it go to Corey Crawford?
Yeah, you look at what Corey's done this year and it's something we've seen for a long time. I think it's nice he's finally getting the recognition from the fans and the media for his performance. People say, 'has he taken that next step?' I think the only next step he's taken for me is maybe in the recognition department. He's been doing this for the last few years. He's been excellent this year, there's no denying that. But I don't know that it's that much different than he did a year ago or two years ago. It's just that he's finally getting the credit for it, which is certainly well deserved.
He's got my vote.
