The Blackhawks Are Betting on Veterans to Buy Time. The Injury List Says Time Is Already Short.

The plan was always going to require patience. Chicago spent the summer constructing a bridge — veteran presence and defensive reinforcement to hold the roster together until Connor Bedard returns from shoulder surgery and the rebuild reaches its next phase. What nobody planned for was the bridge catching fire before the season starts.

The injury crisis facing this team is not a single setback. It is a cascading structural problem. Bedard is out. Artyom Levshunov, who averaged nearly 20 minutes a night last season and was the back end's most productive young piece with 22 points, is sidelined. Ryan Ellis remains on injured reserve. Matt Grzelcyk is down. That is not depth attrition — that is the roster's spine, cracked before a puck drops. The defense that allowed 4.2 goals per game over the final ten games of last season, already a number that demanded urgent correction, now heads into 2026–27 without two of its most important pieces in place at the start.

Here is where the offseason gamble either pays off or falls apart. The narrow path to a functional early season runs through Bowen Byram stepping immediately into the top-pairing role he was acquired and paid to fill — six years, $75 million worth of commitment — and through Patrick Kane providing exactly the kind of stabilizing veteran presence that young, depleted rosters desperately need when the names around them keep disappearing into the training room. Kane's $16 million deal shocked the league, but the logic was never about his counting stats. It was about what he represents in a locker room, and what he can do for a forward group that will otherwise lean on Tyler Bertuzzi's 40 points last season, Andre Burakovsky's 29, and Teuvo Teravainen's 24 as its primary offensive engine. That is a functional group. It is not a group built to carry a broken defense.

What breaks the path is straightforward: if Byram struggles to immediately command top-pairing minutes in a system still finding its footing, or if the veteran additions — Kane included — cannot compensate for the defensive chaos created by Levshunov's and Ellis's absences, Chicago will be in a familiar hole before Bedard ever laces up. The worry I've had since I wrote about this roster last week is that the construction was always contingent on health, and health has been the one thing this organization cannot seem to hold onto. Frank Nazar, who showed real promise with 26 points in 37 games last season, and Ryan Greene, one of the few players who finished the year with a positive plus-minus, will need to be more than depth options. They may need to be answers.

The Toews reunion speculation adds an interesting layer, and I understand the appeal — both symbolically and practically, a healthy Toews would give this team another veteran anchor. But speculation is not a roster solution, and Chicago cannot build its early-season survival plan around a ceremony. The veterans already in the building have to work. Byram has to be the defenseman he told the world he was ready to be. Kane has to be more than a marquee name. And the front office, which ran one of the more aggressive and player-driven rebuilding offseasons in recent memory, now has to watch its plan get tested by circumstances it could not fully control. The receipts on this gamble come due in October.