The Blackhawks left Chicago on Thursday for a nine-hour flight to Berlin, where they’ll play one last exhibition game Sunday before heading to Prague for the regular-season opener.
Twenty-eight players boarded the flight, a higher number than anticipated due to the uncertain injury statuses of Kirby Dach, Calvin de Haan, John Quenneville, Zack Smith, Robin Lehner and Connor Murphy.
That the Hawks brought Dach at all was a good sign, considering the third overall pick has been in concussion protocol for two weeks and has yet to skate with the rest of the team.
“[It’s] unlikely he’ll be ready to play in a game, but the next step is for him to get into practice,” general manager Stan Bowman said Wednesday. “He’s close. I think at this point it makes sense to bring him with us and then we’ll have a better feel for when he’s ready for a game.”
Smith, Lehner and Murphy each picked up injuries in the past few days, but none are believed to be serious. They all were held out of the Blackhawks’ 6-0 loss to the Capitals on Wednesday, a measuring stick game that Jonathan Toews described as a “wake-up call.”
Despite bringing 28 players, the Hawks will still have to be salary cap compliant by Tuesday, then cut their active NHL roster down to 25 before the Oct. 4 Global Series game against the Flyers, then to 23 before the Oct. 10 home opener against the Sharks.
That means that the bubble players coming on the trip — Alex Nylander on the high-likelihood end of the spectrum, Dennis Gilbert on the low-likelihood end, and Quenneville, Brendan Perlini, Anton Wedin, Slater Koekkoek and Carl Dahlstrom in between — still aren’t home free.
“It’s probably easier to have guys there,” Bowman said. “We’re going to have to cut our roster down before the season begins, but [it’s] easier to go over with an extra body or two.”
The Hawks did make two cuts after Wednesday’s game, sending prospects Adam Boqvist and Aleksi Saarela to the AHL.
Saarela requested a trade from Carolina over the summer because he felt he’d been stuck in the minor leagues too long.
Boqvist going down before Gilbert comes as a surprise, though it was always likely that the former top-10 pick would begin his first professional season being groomed in the AHL.
“He’s a great skater, he makes a lot of plays,” coach Jeremy Colliton said of Boqvist on Monday. “We just want to see continual improvement and we want to see intention, that he’s trying to do what we’re asking of him defensively. And I think we’ve seen that. So when he gets here ... there’s no doubt in my mind he’s going to help us.”
As the Hawks make their final and hardest cuts in the coming weeks, they’ll need to be mindful of waivers — of the aforementioned bubble players, only Wedin and Gilbert are waivers exempt. Other teams, too, will have the same conundrum.
That opens up the possibility of trades, a few of which inevitably will happen around the league. Bowman didn’t give a strong indication whether the Hawks might participate.
“Our focus isn’t trying to acquire players, but sometimes at this time of year, other teams are looking around for areas that have been weaknesses,” he said. “Nothing’s imminent, but doesn’t mean something can’t happen quick.”
