Imagine living in a world in which Will Smith slaps Chris Rock at the Oscars and you don’t even know it happens. You don’t see it live, you don’t see the endless memes, and you don’t wade through all the Twitter threads and ponderous think pieces.
Sounds peaceful, doesn’t it? Blissful, even. That’s the world Kirby Dach lives in now that he deleted his social media accounts.
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“It’s nice,” he said with a chuckle. “You obviously miss a lot of news and stuff like that. Like the Oscars thing, I didn’t know about that until my buddies sent me a video of it. You miss some of the funny stuff like that, but it’s nice to clear your mind.”
Look, Dach isn’t soft. He’s not mentally weak, or any of the other hockey pejoratives you want to ascribe to him for ducking out of Twitter and Instagram. This is a hyper-confident 21-year-old playing more than 18 minutes a night in the best hockey league in the world. He’s doing just fine, thank you. He doesn’t need your validation.
But he doesn’t need your negativity, either. About how he can’t score. About how fellow 2019 draftees Moritz Seider, Trevor Zegras and Matt Boldy are out-pacing him. About how he’s already a bust at 21 years old. Because who needs that kind of negativity in their life?
It’s not as if Dach (the No. 3 pick in 2019) doesn’t know he has two fewer goals than Zegras (the No. 9 pick) in 60 more games. Or that Seider (No. 6) has the same number of assists as Dach in 79 fewer games. Or that Boldy (No. 12) is off to a hot start in Minnesota with 27 points in 35 games. Well, maybe he does’t know the exact numbers, but he fully understands that his offense hasn’t come along the way he and the Blackhawks would have liked. Eighteen goals and 39 assists in 148 games is respectable, but it’s not what you’re looking for from the No. 3 pick in his draft.
“I think he’s still untapped,” interim coach Derek King said. “There’s offense there. Is he going to put up Patrick Kane numbers? I hope he does, but I just don’t see that coming. But he can be a solid two-way centerman and can put some numbers up. It’s not going to be off the charts, but this is something we’ll have to keep building on for him. Sometimes it’s hard for those young guys to accept that they’re only going to get 40 points in a year, not 60 or 70. But they don’t see the other side of it. The other side is he defends against the top lines, he plays well in his end, he gets out in crucial moments of the game.”
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Dach takes a lot of pride in those less-heralded aspects of his game, and said his primary goal is to “impact the game in a positive way every night.” He typically does that as the Blackhawks’ third-line center. But he still wants more. And he still thinks he has more to give. He might never become the player we saw during that eye-catching training camp and postseason run in the Edmonton bubble when he had a goal and five assists in nine games against the Oilers and Golden Knights and showed repeated flashes of offensive flair we haven’t seen much of since. Or maybe he will. He just turned 21 in January.
From the outside, it seems as if he’s plateaued since last year’s lost season when a broken wrist suffered at world juniors cost him basically a full year of development — he played 18 games, but the wrist hadn’t fully healed yet. Dach’s not buying that.
“You just have to find a way to start burying those chances,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’ve still been getting them and I know I can finish them because I’ve done it at every level I’ve played at. It’s just a matter of when it actually happens.”
The thing is, however, he didn’t really “dominate” in the Western Hockey League. In his draft year, he was 30th in the league in scoring (73 points in 62 games) and 58th in goals (25). Those are good numbers, but in the high-scoring WHL, they’re not exactly eye-popping. It was his 10-game playoff run, when he had five goals and three assists, that really convinced the now-departed Stan Bowman and Mark Kelley to pick him at No. 3. Had he returned to the WHL, perhaps he could have dominated the way Brandon Hagel, at age 20, did that season, when he had 41 goals and 61 assists in 66 games. Maybe then he would have entered the NHL with more of a goal scorer’s mentality.
Throughout this season, when discussing prospects such as Lukas Reichel or Ian Mitchell, King has preached patience and has repeatedly alluded to players being “rushed” by the Blackhawks in recent seasons. Dach is clearly one of those players. He acquitted himself well as a rookie, proving himself to be a reliable defensive player with occasional outbursts of offense, as an 18-year-old.
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But in hindsight, even general manager Kyle Davidson acknowledges that Dach probably would have been better served by staying in the WHL another year.
“In my opinion, it’s always a little better if you spend more time at a level that you dominate,” said Davidson, who noted that even Jonathan Toews spent an extra season in college before making the jump to the NHL. “Kirby had a really good draft year. Could he have benefitted from staying another year and dominating against his age group? Probably. Probably. But we are where we are and we’re going to manage his ice time and his development accordingly, and we’ll do what’s best for him and for us. So moving forward, there’s lots to be learned from every player and how things have been handled in the past. But you know what? I’m happy with Kirby, so we’re good.”
Dach will be a restricted free agent at the end of the season, and the good news from the Blackhawks’ perspective is he won’t be getting the kind of massive pay raise a No. 3 pick typically gets on his second contract. So if and when he does take that next step, he could be a bargain for quite some time.
“I still hold a lot of promise for Kirby,” Davidson said. “He’s got some tools that you cannot teach. He’s got some abilities that you really covet. The way I always try to look at it is, if Kirby Dach, that package, was on another team, we would really want that. We would really want that package in our organization.”
Well, he’s here. And he’ll be here for years to come. He’s still one of the centerpieces of the rebuild, one of the few players it’s almost impossible to imagine the Blackhawks giving up on. And in his mind, Dach still firmly believes he can be this generation’s Toews, a two-way force who can help lead the Blackhawks back to the top of the league.
No matter what’s being said about him online.
“That’s the confidence I have in my game, to be able to play that game and be that 200-foot shutdown center,” he said. “But also have that offensive flair and make plays. I think I have that, and have that ability now. It’s just got to start coming.”
(Photo: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
