Trade for Antoine Vermette Gives Blackhawks Another Shot at the Stanley Cup

The Chicago Blackhawks are in a difficult position. NHL Numbers indicates that salary-cap pressures threaten the team’s future, starting in earnest this summer. Injuries and a brutal road to the Stanley Cup make the team’s hopes in the present precarious at best.

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On Saturday, general manager Stan Bowman made it clear that if the team was going to go down, it was going to go down swinging.

Landing center Antoine Vermette, per Chris Kuc of the Chicago Tribune, is a significant coup for the Blackhawks. While we won’t know until the trade deadline passes on Monday if he is indeed the best rental player dealt this spring, he probably will be.

In landing him, Chicago addresses a perpetual need in the No. 2 centre slot, robs other clubs of the opportunity to land the impact forward of the 2015 trade deadline and helps to offset the long-term injury to Hart Trophy candidate Patrick Kane.

The Blackhawks did end up paying a dear price. First-round draft picks are the lifeblood of any team’s development system.

Klas Dahlbeck is not a blue-chip prospect—he ranked ninth in our summer assessment of Chicago's system—but he is a solid young defenceman who takes care of his own end first and has a range of abilities.

Don Maloney, the GM on the other end of the trade, had a good explanation for the move. His thumbnail sketch of the deal, via Kuc, is as follows:

"

Antoine Vermette is a terrific player. He’s going to be excellent in Chicago. To Chicago’s credit, they stepped up to get the guy they thought was important. With the market being established, this was a market return. It was a fair deal on both sides.

"

After a one-year blip, the acquisition cost for rental players is once again quite high, reflecting the lottery ticket nature of draft picks.

When we projected a Vermette-to-Chicago trade earlier this week, we suggested a first-round pick and backup goaltender Antti Raanta in exchange, because previous trades had made it clear that was the market value for a player of his caliber. The Blackhawks paid. They didn’t overpay.

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And while Vermette doesn’t fill the hole left by Kane’s broken collarbone, he gives Chicago impressive depth and quality down the middle.

The Blackhawks are the team that won the Stanley Cup in 2013 with Michal Handzus in the No. 2 centre slot and Dave Bolland in the No. 3 hole. With all due respect to those players, the new combination of Vermette and Brad Richards at those positions is a lot more formidable.

This is how Arizona head coach Dave Tippett described Vermette a little under a year ago, via Jason Brough of ProHockeyTalk:

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I look at a player like [Patrice Bergeron], what he does for Boston. Face-offs. Penalty kill. Power play. Can play against other teams’ top players. That’s the role we use [Vermette] in, and he’s been very good for us in that role.

...

Good center-men are hard to find. He’s a good player. Plays in all situations. He’s a good teammate. He’s fit in very well with our group.

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Vermette is a complete player, a two-way centre with strengths in a lot of different areas whom we might—without any slight intended—call a poor man’s Patrice Bergeron.

Sliding him between Jonathan Toews and Richards on the depth chart will give the Blackhawks a one-two-three punch at centre that stacks up well with that of most teams in the league and gives them strength they have not had at the position since 2010.

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The difficulties the team still faces are exceptional. If the playoffs started today, Chicago would be playing St. Louis in the first round. If the Blackhawks were to win that series, the NHL-leading Nashville Predators would likely await in Round 2.

Given the timeline of the Kane injury, Chicago likely has to get through both of those opponents minus its most dynamic offensive weapon.

Vermette doesn’t solve those problems. He does make solving them a little easier.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.