If You Can't Spot The Sucker At The Table...

Kyle Davidson starts on the path that gets everyone fired.

Have to admit, there is slightly more than a small sense of satisfaction when everyone else finally sees what you've seen.

This summer, armed with the #4 pick, the last top five pick that Kyle Davidson and the Hawks should need for a very long time, Davidson had a simple charge. However, wherever, Davidson had to walk into training camp in September having armed the Hawks with a genuine top six forward. Davidson had also gotten it in his head that they needed a top-pairing defenseman, even though they spent all of last season yodeling from the Alps how promising and alluring their corps of young blue-liners were. But hey, if the Hawks ended up with both a new top six forward and a top pairing d-man, so much the better. It would finally be a signal of ambition from an organization ordering everything mild spicy for far too long.

Kyle Davidson will get neither.

There was a route to both. Perhaps something weird would have happened at the draft, and Ivar Stenberg or Caleb Malhotra would fallen. Chase Reid projects to be as good as anything the Hawks currently have. That #4 pick could have been part of a package for Jason Robertson or William Eklund. Or they could have drafted Reid and simply signed Robertson to a large enough offer sheet to take the Stars out of the equation. We could do this all day and run through a bunch of permutations of the damned.

Instead, Davidson took his biggest trade chip, that #4 pick, and hurriedly gave it away for Bowen Byram, who tops out as a second-pairing defenseman. A second-pairing player that Davidson will now have to pay like a premier top-pairing players, because he has no choice.

There is no plainer way to say it: There is nothing special about Byram. He's had six seasons to show what might be, and the only thing he's done well is get hurt. If he had shown enough to anchor the second pairing in Colorado, the Avs wouldn't have given up on him for the desperation heave of trying to turn Casey Mittelstadt into a #2 center on contender. If he had shown the ability to unseat Owen Power from the second pairing in Buffalo, it is not Byram who would have been on the block. And Power doesn't really do anything special, either.

Byram is not a gifted puck-mover. He is shaky defensively. He does not get his team out of their zone cleanly, consistently. He skates well, but without eye-popping puck skills. The Hawks already have four or five of those guys. Byram is Alex Vlasic with a better draft pedigree and the luster of two teams who thought he could be more than he's ever shown. There's also the fact that he seems to be gleefully trading in Cup contention in Buffalo for the chance to make top-pairing money in Chicago. Which is what he thought he was getting in Buffalo, and he left Cup contention in Denver for it. How many times does he get to pull this?

Now Davidson doesn't have that forward, be it an actual center (keep in mind, all the Hawks have now are three guys they only "think" can play center in Bedard, Nazar, and Frondell), nor does he have the ammo to trade for one (no other team thinks nearly as much of the Hawks prospects as they do), and he's got a collection of d-men who haven't come anywhere close to grabbing the mantle of a top-pairing ice-turner.

But he's going to have to hand Byram some $10 million a year. Otherwise, he'll have to explain how he gave up a #4 pick for nothing. That's the kind of thing that gets guys fired. But then, so does giving up a top-five pick for merely a contributor, a contributor on a team finishing 31st again.

The question is why. Why did Davidson feel that he had to have Byram right now? Reid projects to be everything Byram is, possibly more, Davidson would just have to wait a year. Why is that such a problem for a GM who has done nothing but tell people that better days are on the horizon? One would have to conclude that either there is actually more pressure from Danny Wirtz than anyone has let on, or Davidson has simply gotten lost between his own ears.

There is evidence that the latter gets the best of him. A year ago, he signed Frank Nazar to a completely unnecessary extension. It felt as though Davidson was in a hurry to prove things were moving forward after years of inertia, and promises of a new day in the distance. Nazar rewarded him with a season stuck right where he was, a defensively iffy, small center who only scores when it's easy. His place in the top six of the Hawks future is hardly guaranteed now.

This trade is that, multiplied by six. Davidson was in a hurry to do something, anything, that he got suckered into doing anything. The only GM Jarmo Kekalainen was able to fleece when he was in Columbus was Stan Bowman, on two separate Brandon Saad trades. Now he's done it to Bowman's protege. The symmetry would be delicious, if it didn't make you want to put your head in a blender.

The kicker is that, if there is more to be genuinely mined out of Byram that turns him into what was promised six years ago on draft night, Jeff Blashill is not the one to do so. Byram's offensive game isn't going to blossom into an artful array when he's never allowed to cross the red line and is buried in that 1-1-3 meant to keep things to a 2-1 loss.

But Davidson got stuck with Blashill in a panic when his first choice, his first choice he was convinced was all signed for and delivered in David Carle, told him to do one. It seems that Davidson did it again, getting stuck in a panic to land anything when it became clear the Sharks would deprive him of the chance of drafting Stenberg.

Byram is a fine player. He's probably not much more than that. The Hawks don't need fine players. They already had fine players, and fine players on defense. Vlasic is fine. Kaiser is fine. They need difference makers. They gave up something genuinely valuable for fine, all in the name of looking like they were busy.

In the next couple weeks, an extension for Byram will be announced. And when the Hawks muddle through yet another season, humping a doorknob wildly to manage five goals in a week, that extension will be the impetus for the first ounce of pressure to be exerted on Davidson. Maybe that's the only hope out of all this. Which really isn't hope at all.