Thirteen years ago, new Blackhawks wing Pat Maroon made his NHL debut — as a Ducks rookie — at the United Center against the Hawks.

“My first shift, I got up the wall, [Brent] Seabrook blew me up and the puck went back around to [Corey] Perry,” Maroon recalled. “I ended up with a two-on-one with [Ryan] Getzlaf. He passed it over, and I missed it. Getzy comes over to me after we sit down and says, ‘I thought you were a right-hand shot.’ ”

In a sense, joining the Hawks represents a full-circle moment for Maroon, who’s 36 but notably still a left-handed shooter. He isn’t ready to share how many more years he plans to play, but it’s obvious that retirement has at least reached the horizon.

“I’m actually just going to focus on this year, see what happens and go from there,” he said.

There are quite a few random NHL veterans that fans who didn’t closely follow the Hawks’ offseason bonanza will be surprised to see wearing red and white come October. On social media, expect many posts along the lines of, “He plays for the Hawks now?”

Maroon might be the most common subject of those tweets, since his signing July 1 flew relatively under the radar. Even in Chicago, Teuvo Teravainen and Tyler Bertuzzi’s signings hours beforehand overshadowed it.

He has bounced around the league throughout his career — the Hawks will be his eighth team after the Ducks, Oilers, Devils, Blues, Lightning, Wild and Bruins — but he has almost exclusively played for contenders, unlike the Hawks.

Moving from Minnesota to Boston at the deadline last season allowed him to extend a streak of eight consecutive years participating in the playoffs. He’s perhaps most famous for winning the Stanley Cup in three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021 (with the Blues and Lightning), becoming the first player to accomplish that feat since 1983.

He may well keep his playoff streak alive in 2025 because the one-year, $1.3 million contract he signed with the Hawks could be flipped easily at the deadline. In the meantime, he’ll learn what it’s like to be on a rebuilding team — just like fellow new signings Alec Martinez (who has made the playoffs in 10 of the last 13 years), Craig Smith (nine of the last 10 years), T.J. Brodie (six straight years) and Teravainen (six straight years) will.

“Obviously, as you get older, sometimes you get moved around a lot,” Maroon said. “I knew, going into free agency, it might be another new team but also an opportunity to continue my career.”

On the other hand, the fact many of the Hawks’ signings have such experience and familiarity with success should help propel their culture forward.

“Everyone coming in, playing the right way, pulling on the same rope and sticking up for each other builds a special bond in the room that translates on the ice,” Maroon said. “[There are] a lot of good players they signed and a lot of good veteran players that have won before, so there’s a lot of voices of reason around the room where people can ask questions.”

Maroon spends his summers in Tampa, Florida, now, but he still identifies as a St. Louisan and has plenty of family there. Signing with the Hawks therefore made geographical sense, although it ruffled the feathers of friends invested in the Hawks-Blues and Cubs-Cardinals rivalries.

“They said they can’t really root for me, but that’s OK,” he quipped.

Maroon scored as many as 27 goals once during his prime, but at this stage of his career, he has settled in as a pure fourth-line grinder. In 131 games over the last two seasons, he has tallied 30 points, 210 penalty minutes (seventh-most among NHL forwards) and 254 hits.

One thing the Hawks sought when assembling their 2024-25 roster was clearer, more established roles for each player, and it’s clear what role Maroon will fill. If he stays healthy, he figures to singlehandedly replace both Jarred Tinordi and Reese Johnson as the Hawks’ primary fighter while also roughing it up in puck battles in the corners and around the net.

There’s some question about whether he’ll be able to stay healthy, though. After missing four games over three seasons before last summer, he missed 31 games last season recovering from back surgery in February, returning just in time for the playoffs.

This summer, while working with Tampa-based trainer Dylan Smith, he hasn’t been weightlifting because doing so could reaggravate his back injury. Instead, he and Smith focused on mobility and cardio work before he began ramping up his skating about a month ago.

“Backs are tricky; you never know,” Maroon said. “Right now, it’s healthy, so we’ve got to continue to knock on wood. Back surgery is not something you want to go through, especially as an athlete, because it’s hard to come back from. The way I play, it’s a heavy game — it’s hitting and other things that don’t help your back out. But I feel healthy and ready to rock.”

Smith, Ryan Donato, Joey Anderson and Landon Slaggert will likely compete for the other fourth-line spots next to Maroon, who — despite his relatively certain role — will have to do plenty of competing himself to prove he deserves a regular spot in the lineup.

That lack of job security for basically every forward except Connor Bedard was another part of the Hawks’ plan when they assembled their roster. But it sounds like Maroon is prepared for it.

“I feel really good body-wise, very lean right now,” he said. “I’m looking forward to coming in, working hard and competing.”

Notes: This week, the Hawks signed prospect forward Marek Vanacker, the 27th overall pick in this year’s draft, to his three-year entry-level contract. Vanacker is headed back to the OHL’s Brantford Bulldogs for the season, so the start of that contract will slide at least one year.

The Rockford IceHogs hired Josh MacNevin as an assistant coach to fill out Anders Sorensen’s staff. Mac-Nevin, formerly an assistant coach for the WHL’s Kelowna Rockets, replaces Jared Nightingale, who left for an ECHL head-coaching job.