The fact that Chicago Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman has been trying to inject some life into his team could not be more clear. Earlier this month Bowman shocked the world when he announced the termination of long time head coach Joel Quenneville as the organizations bench boss, promoting Jeremy Colliton to Quenneville's former position.
Unfortunately the firing of one of the best coaches in the league does not seem to have done a great deal to turn things around for the Blackhawks, although admittedly it's still a small sample size, and all the pressure is now firmly on the shoulders of Bowman himself. The reality of the situation is that Quenneville only had the players that Bowman provided him to work with and there have been some questions about Bowman's moves in the recent past.
In spite of some of the concerns about Bowman's more recent transactions many fans have been calling on the general manager to make some type of shift to the roster in order to lift up his team, and it sounds like Bowman is attempting to do exactly that. Speaking with Blackhawks insider Scott Powers of The Athletic Bowman admitted that it was something he had been looking to do.
“That’s a possibility,” he said as per Powers. “You know we’ve had a lot of discussions recently, even going back a few weeks. Nothing’s really at the finish line right now. But, yeah, in the absence of new players coming in, we got to try to show progress with this group. But to answer your question, yeah, we’re looking. We’ve had some interesting conversations, but nothing … there really haven’t been a lot of trades.”
Now that may not sound all that promising from a trade perspective but if Bowman does in fact want to make another run with his current roster it will require him to make some changes. Bowman did share some good news on the trade front as well however, indicating to Powers that activity was picking up on the trade market.
“I’m finding more discussions in the last 10 days across the league with managers that I have talked to. I think everyone’s at that point now where they sort of know, figured out what their team is, what guys can do, maybe areas where they’re deficient or things they want to do a lateral move to maybe if they have an abundance of one and shortness in another area. I think league-wide there’s going to be some movement over the next three, four weeks leading into holidays. If that materializes for us, you know we’ll see.”
Bowman stated that he was trying to improve his roster in a lot of areas and given the Blackhawks struggles this season that does make a lot of sense. That does however make it difficult to pin down what type of trade Bowman may be considering at this time, but the name Nick Schmaltz continues to pop up in just about every Blackhawks trade rumor. That being said we'll likely have to wait and see what the crafty general manager can put together. Given his apparent lack of success on the trade front as of late it seems like this may be a very important one for him as well.
