CHICAGO — Whatever you think of Kyle Davidson as Chicago Blackhawks general manager, you can’t say he doesn’t put his heart in it.

Looking back on the season, Davidson dealt with several curveballs: firing a coach, a player’s very public trade request and a worse-than-expected finish in the standings.

But the biggest bombshell was learning he needed to replace a pulmonary valve in his heart, just days before his second daughter, Charlotte, was born, and a couple of weeks before he dismissed coach Luke Richardson.

“It was a challenging season for myself,” he said during end-of-season interviews Thursday at Fifth Third Arena. “I would say that’s mostly away from the rink. … New child, a heart surgery and going through that whole situation where … feeling the way I was feeling, finding out the news, going through the process of second, third opinions and doing that all while in between work. That’s not easy.

“I didn’t have heart surgery on my bingo card this year.”

Earlier this season, Davidson talked to the Chicago Tribune about the challenges — “curveballs and grenades, ups and downs,” he later called it — that he navigated in his third full season since he was promoted from interim general manager to the permanent role in March 2022.

One particular episode in mid-November tested him and his family.

But you have to start at the beginning.

“I was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect, and so I’ve been followed by a cardiologist my whole life,” the 36-year-old Sudbury, Ontario, native said. “I had two open hearts really early on in life (as an infant), another open-heart (surgery) in November 2019, and so I’m very in tune with what is normal for me and what’s not.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot,” Davidson’s wife, Angelica, told the Tribune. “When he initially told me about it (while dating), it was just something he kind of just brushed off: ‘By the way, I’ve got this heart condition, not a big deal. Doesn’t affect anything in life.’

“Like, ‘OK, that’s good. You should probably see a cardiologist, though.’ And he is like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. And fast forward a couple weeks later, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I need open-heart surgery.’

“We weren’t even dating a year, and I was obviously not married, no kids, and I was still scared out of my mind.”

Davidson had surgery for a pulmonary valve replacement in November 2019, and he was told it would likely last 10 to 15 years.

But he started experiencing symptoms that something was amiss in late August and early September.

“It’s a combination of palpitations, fatigue, inability to really do workouts that I would be able to do previously; shortness of breath, especially laying on my back,” Davidson said. “All kinds of things that are little signs along the way that something isn’t working especially well.”

He got tested and the results indicated some abnormalities with the pulmonary valve, and he and his physicians had a plan for more testing and treatment.

But then he experienced another bout of heart palpitations, “a really aggressive beating of the heart,” Davidson said. “It kind of threw up some flags.”

Davidson admitted himself to a hospital in Chicago around the time the Hawks were out west for games in Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, from Nov. 14-16.

“So during that time more tests showed that, you know what there is, there is a failure of the pulmonary valve, and it needs to be replaced,” he said.

It came as a shock. Typically, replacement valves last at least a decade, and it was only five years for Davidson’s.

“That was a tough bit of news,” he said. “It was at a time where the team wasn’t doing as well. My wife is basically at her due date with our second daughter. … Our daughter, Charlotte, was born on the 26th. So, like, literally a week later.”

Davidson, now with two young daughters, Charlotte and Willa, pushed his health concerns to the back-burner.

But he knew at some point that season, his heart problem needed to be addressed.

“For myself, there are leaflets in a valve that allow blood flow in and out,” Davidson said. “(As) it was explained to me, one of the leaflets was just basically nonexistent. It just wasn’t working anymore … causing the heart to work much harder than it needs to, and thus enlarging the heart.”

Meanwhile, the Hawks kept looking worse, with young franchise player Connor Bedard admitting “you lose a bit of confidence” during a 12-game goal drought.

Finally, when the Hawks had gone on a four-game losing streak with a Dec. 4 home loss to the Boston Bruins — eight losses in 10 games — Davidson decided to pull the plug.

The next day, he fired Richardson and promoted Rockford IceHogs coach Anders Sörensen to Hawks interim coach.

Davidson wasn’t going to wait for a time that was more convenient to his personal life.

“It’s not necessarily something that I decided that night or that game, like it’s a little bit of an accumulation, naturally,” he said. “But no, I never considered kicking anything down the road, probably other than my health.

“If something’s going to be delayed, it’s me.”

On the day of the Bruins game, while Davidson’s head was in “10 different places,” he and his family filmed a segment for the NHL’s “Road to the Winter Classic,” going behind the scenes of the lead-up to the Hawks’ nationally televised game against the St. Louis Blues on New Year’s Eve at Wrigley Field.

“My wife’s on camera talking, and I’m just thinking about, like, medical visits, game that night, hopefully we don’t have to make a coaching change, but we’re really close,” he said.

The taping “was in the afternoon. The next morning, we made a coaching change,” he said.

Angelica remembered how Davidson was at that time: “He was just down about having to make that call. … When he has to make those decisions, it genuinely weighs on him.

“He loses sleep over that stuff and what that’s going to feel like for Luke and his family.”

Davidson hasn’t backed away from his decision — or the timing of it.

“The job never stops,” he said. “If anything, I kicked the can for my heart down the road. … Postponing the job was never a consideration.”

But he could only put off the choice he faced for so long: open-heart surgery, which required a long recovery process, or a less invasive, outpatient transcatheter procedure, which called for making an incision in the groin area and inserting a replacement valve, which is then guided up to the heart.

After gathering more information about both options, he learned that in his case, medically, one wasn’t any more beneficial long term than the other.

And Davidson remembered what it was like recovering from heart surgery in 2019.

“I think some of the most intense pain I’ve experienced is sneezing or coughing or even laughing after getting open heart and that sternum is healing itself,” he said. “The chest plates have to grow back together. And so it’s really intense. It’s not something I wanted to experience again.”

It was decided: transcatheter.

The Davidsons drove up to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for a valve replacement scheduled for Feb. 11.

“We actually ended up having to take Charlotte with us on that five-hour car ride,” Angelica said.

Since then Davidson has had check-ins with his cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital while keeping doctors at the Mayo Clinic informed of his progress.

Still, he didn’t get much of a reprieve.

Later that month, defenseman Seth Jones went public with his desire to be traded to a contender before the March 7 deadline. The Hawks swung a deal to trade Jones to the Florida Panthers on March 1.

Throughout the season, Davidson had been “forced” to delegate more to his staff more than what’s normally within his comfort zone.

If a test he needed to do required anesthesia, “you can’t jump right back to the office,” Davidson said. “And so you do have to lean on them.

“(Associate general manager) Norm (Maciver) is going to be with the coaches for this number of games. Or (assistant general manager) Meghan (Hunter) is going to handle something going on in the front office. … Or someone needs to go see that game in Rockford that I can’t attend now.”

Colleagues with the Hawks wonder how he managed it all this season.

“Incredibly, he finds a way to balance it all, which is just so impressive,” Chairman and CEO Danny Wirtz said.

Defenseman Connor Murphy added that team executives “don’t really have any time off, and even on off days, they spend a lot of times on the phones and in offices trying to get stuff done,” he said. “So you feel for him and hope (he) and his family are healthy.”

Despite receiving a positive prognosis for his procedure, Davidson acknowledges that he can never fully put his heart condition behind him.

It’s a lifelong companion.

“It’s going to be something that’s in the back of my mind for the rest of my life,” he said. ”‘How is it going to hold up?’ … “There’s still that little seed of doubt and that maybe, like a grain of sand that keeps grinding, keeps grinding.”

It weighs on Angelica too.

“It just seems like the stakes are just so much higher given that we’ve had more time in our relationship,” she said. “Now we’re married, we also have these two little girls. He already has so much on his plate with his job and traveling and everything that occupies his mental space there. So it’s been a lot to navigate for the both of us, for sure.”

For Davidson, going through that adversity shapes who he is now.

“It changes you,” he said. “It has to. … It doesn’t change the hockey side of my managing and what I see on the ice, but it changes how you handle adverse situations. … You can call back on on how you managed through something like that.”

If there was a rainbow after the storm, it came from the future.

In the second half of the season, the Hawks started calling up high-end prospects from Rockford or signing them after their college seasons.

Landon Slaggert, Artyom Levshunov, Sam Rinzel, Oliver Moore, for example, and they performed beyond expectations.

Frank Nazar, who came up in the first half, looked like a future star by the end of the season.

Wirtz said he’s proud Davidson’s seeing “the fruit of his labor start to come to fruition.”

“The first part of his tenure was just assembling the assets and the pieces,” Wirtz said. “Now they’re actually players that are on the ice that we’re starting to see them become real players in the NHL. …

“Still a long way to go, but now you’re starting to see it, and it’s exciting.”

The 25-46-11 season ended with two straight wins and a standings point in five of the last six games — what constitutes as a high note by Hawks standards in recent seasons.

And given how the team finished, powered by the youth movement, Davidson said he can’t help but be optimistic. So he looks forward to getting back in shape, prioritizing family and putting the job on the back-burner. For now.

“This is a challenging job. It doesn’t matter what year,” he said during the exit interviews Thursday. “There’s going to be curveballs and grenades, ups and downs and whatever you have to deal with. … It’s all part of our growth and maturation as an organization, as a team, in this rebuild. …

“I feel like at the end of the day, standing here now, that we feel like we’re in a good spot moving forward.”

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