Kane Is Back on the Ice. The Team Around Him Is Not Quite There Yet.

Patrick Kane took the ice at training camp this week, getting reacquainted with surroundings he knows well — the rink, the organization, the city. He won three Stanley Cups here. He knows where everything is. What's different is the roster around him, and right now a good chunk of it isn't available.

Connor Bedard, the captain who recruited Kane back to Chicago and signed his own five-year extension in July, is still recovering from left shoulder surgery. Artyom Levshunov and Matt Grzelcyk are also sidelined or day-to-day, and Ryan Ellis remains on injured reserve. That's a lot of absence for a team that went 29-53 last season and is supposed to be accelerating, not idling. Kane's presence matters — a Hall of Famer in camp stabilizes a young group — but his veteran leadership can only do so much when the players he's supposed to be playing alongside aren't on the ice with him.

In the meantime, the early offensive burden falls on Tyler Bertuzzi, who was the most reliable forward Chicago had last season, and on Andre Burakovsky and Teuvo Teravainen behind him. The back end got reinforcements this summer — Bowen Byram, Korchinski's extension, Del Mastro's signing — but several of those pieces are currently unavailable too. The rebuild is real. The infrastructure is being built. Camp just started with more holes than the front office drew up.