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Chicago Blackhawks GM goes unnoticed, plays along in hilarious hockey interview

On3 imageby: Andrew Graham06/28/23AndrewEdGraham
Kyle Davidson Media Availability
(Photo by Chase Agnello-Dean/NHLI via Getty Images)

Kyle from Chicago, AKA Chicago Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson, did a man on the street interview in Nashville ahead of the NHL Draft on Wednesday night. And it seems like the identity of the man who holds the No. 1 overall pick in his hands flew under the radar of his interviewer.

From surface-level asks like “Name as many hockey players as you can in 20 seconds” — Davidson got to 17, mostly former Blackhawks — to a query about the NHL rigging the draft to get Chicago the No. 1 pick, the GM was nonplussed. And the resulting video is a great pre-draft laugh.

“Yeah, big Hawks fan,” Davidson said after naming roughly a dozen players from the Blackhawks recent heyday in the early 2010s.

The Blackhawks themselves got in on the humor, quote tweeting the video with a simple caption: “Kyle from Chicago ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

He was asked, on a scale of 1-to-10, how much he knows about hockey, with 10 being the most.

Davidson took the chance to be a little self-deprecating.

“Probably like — I didn’t play professionally or anything so probably like a four. Fan of the sport. I don’t know, some people say I don’t know that much,” Davidson said.

He was asked what he’d change about the NHL if he had carte blanche to make one big alteration, but he said he’d be happy to keep the game relatively unchanged.

And as for the No. 1 pick in the draft, which Chicago is expected to use on clear-cut top prospect Connor Bedard, Davidson was adamant that there had been no funny business.

“No,” Davidson said about the possibility of the draft being rigged.

He was asked how confident he was in that assessment.

“I’m very confident,” he said with a smirk while discussing the lack of improprieties.

And while the interviewer and photographer hadn’t identified Davidson during the interview, the clearly did during the edit, noting their oversight mid-stream. And at the end of the video, they had a little humor themselves, showing Davidson and someone in a Bedard jersey on screen with a simple message.

“It was nice meeting you Kyle! Good luck with the #1 overall pick tonight,” it said.

The 2023 NHL Draft is slated to begin on Wednesday night at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. The first round will be televised on ESPN and starts at 7 p.m. EST on Wednesday. The second through seventh rounds will be on Thursday, beginning at 11 a.m.