The 2018-19 NHL regular season is all but over for the Chicago Blackhawks. They host the Dallas Stars on Friday and visit the Nashville Predators on Saturday for their final game of the season. There will be no push to raise a fourth Stanley Cup title in 10 years and seventh in the history of the franchise. For the Blackhawks, the only real elements of drama remaining are, where do they slot in the 2019 NHL Draft lottery and will they be able to surge past the [season points total the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook set at 84.5](https://www.betchicago.com/nhl-season-point-totals-blackhawks-odds). They’re sitting at 82 heading into Friday, and an OVER will wreck their chances of picking in the top three or the top 10. But don’t worry, OVER bettors. If what we’ve seen this season is any indicator, the Blackhawks will exert maximum effort in the final two games of the season, hurting themselves long-term to feel good about how they finished and maybe to spoil Nashville’s bid to win the NHL Central. When we later look back on the 2018-19 season, it’ll be easier to decide whether this was good for the Blackhawks’ future or not. Right now, it feels impossible to tell. A jumbled Central division and a top-heavy Pacific left the organization in an odd spot where they were within arm’s length of the playoff picture they had no business being involved in to begin with. And credit is due to the NHL’s players. Because short of building a roster that can’t compete and making personnel decisions that are not in the best short-term interest of the team, it’s just about impossible to get the 23 men on a roster to do anything but try their hardest in this league. So the Blackhawks fought for that playoff spot and fought valiantly. They had a seven-game winning streak and a five-game winning streak in the second half of the season and occupied a playoff spot at points, even if only momentarily. Good came of that, too. The Blackhawks shook things up early and traded Nick Schmaltz to the Arizona Coyotes for Dylan Strome and Brendan Perlini. Strome blossomed with the Blackhawks and Perlini proved himself to be a [worthy third-line scorer](https://chicagosportscolumn.com/blackhawks/brendan-perlini-explosion-blackhawks/) during that second winning streak, potting six goals during the five-game blitz. Alex DeBrincat took the next step as an emerging star with 41 goals and 74 total points heading into the home stretch. At age 30, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane both set career highs for points. Brandon Saad has bounced back with 23 goals and 46 points after managing just 18 and 35 a season ago. Erik Gustafsson emerged as an offensive force from the blue line with 59 points. Collin Delia looks capable of contributing as a backup next season and could be the [goalie of the future](https://www.betchicago.com/collin-delia-best-blackhawks-goalie-option). The Blackhawks will take all that with them into an offseason where they should have plenty of money to be players in free agency. Short of Toews and Kane’s productivity dropping off the table, there’s no viable excuse for the Blackhawks to be any worse next season than they were this season with the ability to add proven NHLers and a farm system starting to bear fruit. However, there are some harsh realities to face as well. The underlying peripherals told us all season that the Blackhawks were never real threats no matter how much we wanted to believe that their experience made them one. They were too poor defensively and yielded far [too many high-danger chance](https://www.betchicago.com/blackhawks-quality-scoring-chances)s despite team 5v5 Corsi For (17th) and Fenwick For (21st) numbers that weren’t abysmal. If you’re taking 49.2 percent of all shots (Corsi) and 48.5 percent of unblocked shots (Fenwick), you should theoretically be creating a similar number of high-danger chances. Instead, the Blackhawks created just 42.7 percent of the high-danger chances in [5v5 play](https://www.naturalstattrick.com/teamtable.php). That is the worst mark in the league by over 1.5 percentage points and indicative of the real problem Chicago faced all season. They lost opponents and allowed them to get into the most dangerous areas of the ice too regularly. That’s a team-wide issue, from the forwards to the defenders to sloppy puck-handling by goalies to the coaching staff. However, the play of the top two lines offensively begin to excuse the forwards, the goalies can only do so much, and there was a coaching staff change that never seemed to alter the issue. Which leaves us with the blue line and ultimately general manager Stan Bowman. As Scott Powers of The Athletic [pointed out Tuesday](https://www.naturalstattrick.com/teamtable.php), the blue line issues fall at Bowman’s feet because he made the decision after last season that the situation would correct itself. The Blackhawks were young and bad defensively, but Bowman reasoned that experience on its own would make them better, and it backfired. Re-signing Jan Rutta and Erik Gustafsson (which turned out to be one good thing) while failing to move other fringe defensive prospects created a logjam of players who belonged as seventh defenders or in the AHL but were being asked to play critical roles. That eventually forced the Blackhawks to send Henri Jokiharju, their 19-year-old Finnish phenom, to Rockford even though he’d been their best defender statistically all year. The organization spun a yarn about how the only way to get Jokiharju 20 minutes a night of ice time was to send him to the AHL, ignoring the data that told us he should have easily been seeing that much time in Chicago. Now they’ll hope that decision doesn’t impact his confidence because he’s a critical part of whatever comes next (more on that later). Bowman also failed to move Marian Hossa’s contract in time for the Blackhawks to be major players in free agency where they could have added a top-four defender or scoring depth. Instead, they were forced to settle for spending the cap space moving Hossa created on Cam Ward, Brandon Manning and 39-year-old Chris Kunitz. Ward was forced into the starting role on multiple occasions and played okay in spurts, with his final stat line impacted heavily by that shoddy defense. However, he blocked Delia and Anton Forsberg from seeing time that could have helped the Blackhawks make long-term decisions on those younger players, while Manning was eventually traded and Kunitz never made serious contributions. That’s what left them chasing the carrot all season long and failing to make the few splash moves they could have made to simultaneously free up cap/roster space, acquire assets and get worse at the trade deadline. Instead, they stood pat and wound up in no-man’s land when it comes to draft position next season. The Blackhawks could finish ninth-worst in the NHL standings, which would give them a 16 percent chance of landing a top-three pick and would guarantee they pick between 9-12 if they don’t land a top-three pick. But with a couple wins to finish the season, they could finish 14th-worst, which would leave them a 5.0 percent chance of picking top-three and guarantee either the 14th or 15th pick if they don’t get lucky. Had they played their cards right, they could have been one of the five worst teams while freeing up time for prospects and focusing on development. The fifth-worst team has a 27.1 percent chance of picking in the top three and can’t pick worse than eighth. An early pick or two can change the entire complexion of a franchise. Toews and Kane are direct testaments to that, and while it’s not the end-all-be-all for the Blackhawks, the benefits to finding a way to temporarily make themselves worse so they could make themselves better long-term were clear and Bowman ignored them. What’s frustrating about that if you’re a Blackhawks fan is that there is a long-term fix in the works for the blue-line issues. Jokiharju, Ian Mitchell, Adam Boqvist and Nicolas Beaudin all have top-four ability and could turn the Blackhawks back into the puck-moving, positionally-sound defenders we expect. But that will take years. Boqvist and Beaudin being ready by next season are pipe dreams, and Mitchell signing his entry-level contract next season is uncertain. Even if they were all ready, they’re still a couple of NHL seasons away from approaching their true potentials and solving the issues. The Blackhawks don’t have years though. Kane and Toews are both 30, Duncan Keith is 35 and Brent Seabrook is 33. Those four players are going to take up $33.4 million in salary cap space until at least 2024 (Seabrook is signed through 2025). The window for the Blackhawks to get productivity out of Kane, Toews and Keith without their contracts completely crippling the franchise is closing. It’s already slammed shut for Seabrook. So the Blackhawks don’t have three seasons to wait to see what becomes of their teenage and 20-something defensive prospects. Which is exactly why it’s so hard to know what to make of this season. We know they cost themselves a chance to focus on development this season by trying to push for a playoff spot. But if stripping the roster (to the extent that they could) would have kept DeBrincat or Strome from their breakthroughs or Toews his bounceback, would that have been worth it? What we know is that the Blackhawks cost themselves their best statistical chance of landing a draft pick that could have netted them a transcendent talent. We know that they left themselves serious questions on prospects like Dylan Sikura and Victor Ejdsell and have created difficult scenarios this offseason as they enter restricted free agency that wouldn’t have been as difficult had they played/played more. We know that they threw a new wrinkle into Henri Jokiharju’s ascent to top-pairing defender and that Corey Crawford’s health is going to loom over them until they have a clear plan of succession at goalie (although locking Delia into a team-friendly deal to make him the backup with starter’s upside was wise). We know they didn’t make the playoffs and all the feel-goods that could have come with that went away the moment they were eliminated. At the same time, we know they got a little better this season. The record (and maybe even that OVER ticket) tells us as much. We just don’t know if they got better fast enough to take advantage of a small window of opportunity before things could get really bad. And so the legacy of 2018-19 hangs in the balance. __Play for free__: [Predict final score of Stars-Blackhawks, win merch](https://betchicago.chalkline.com/games/chicago-nhl-puck-drop)