Patrick Kane's Next Team(s) Have A Dilemma

Is the future HOFer in decline, or just phoning it in?

As has been the case all season — or at least, since it became clear that the Chicago Blackhawks were once again among the dregs of hockey — Patrick Kane’s name is near the top of The Athletic’s NHL trade deadline big board.

It makes sense in theory. Kane scored 92 points as recently as last season, and he’s due to be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year. Chicago is a disaster and badly needs to rebuild (it’s in the Connor Bedard sweepstakes for a reason); Kane won’t be a part of the next Blackhawks contender. Plenty of teams in the playoff picture could use a playmaker of Kane’s reputation.

But those teams — and whoever pursues Kane over the summer, for that matter — do need to decide whether Kane is just unmotivated as Chicago’s ship sinks further toward the bottom of Lake Michigan, or if Kane is not the player he used to be. Because either way, he has been pretty awful this season.

This is obviously the worst season of Kane’s illustrious career, by far. His 14 adjusted goals are a career-low. His 38 adjusted assists are a career-low. His 52 adjusted points are a career-low. His -29 plus/minus is a career-low, and is -1 off of teammate Philipp Kurashev for the worst mark in the entire league. His close-score 5-on-5 Corsi of 39.4% is 10th-worst in the league. Somehow, the NHL’s second-worst possession team gets substantially worse when Kane is on the ice. Add it all up, and Kane is tracking for just 2.1 adjusted Goals Above Replacement (GAR) this year, a horrible season by the standards of a player who is a lock for the Hall of Fame someday.

In a lot of ways, it’s understandable. As mentioned above, the Blackhawks — the only team Kane has ever played for, a team with which he won three Stanley Cups — are going nowhere. He’s been in and out of the lineup recently with a lower-body injury. The trade rumors are swirling. Kane himself even expressed disappointment that the New York Rangers went out and got Vladimir Tarasenko from the St. Louis Blues in a trade earlier this month, as it meant he would probably not be on the Broadway Blueshirts’ shopping list anymore. When you are openly pining to play somewhere else, you may not be in the mental space to put up your best numbers.

But Kane has been on bad Blackhawks teams before in recent seasons, and he still maintained a high level of offensive output. His two best recent seasons by GAR came in 2018-19 and 2019-20, when Chicago had a cumulative 68-84 record. He was younger then, but still in his thirties (he’s also only 34 now). This season is worse than those by orders of magnitude, part of a multi-year trend in declining adjusted GAR. In fact, if you take Kane’s 10 most similar players through age 34 — a star-studded list — only one of them (Bryan Trottier) was anywhere near this bad at age 34.

By then, Trottier was a role player on the Pittsburgh Penguins, helping them win the first of two back-to-back Stanley Cups. But he was also far removed from his days as a star on the New York Islanders’ dynasty teams of the early 1980s. That career path actually maps eerily well onto Kane’s arc (substitute the Islanders’ dynasty for the Blackhawks’) — but only if he is no longer a star.

And that’s the big question facing Kane’s deadline suitors, as well as his next team in free agency. Is Kane still capable of playing like we’ve been accustomed to seeing from him over the years? Will he thrive outside the demotivating environment of a once-great team now in shambles? Can he help you win a Stanley Cup? Or is this Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year indicative of what Kane will be going forward?