Henri Jokiharju’s promising but ill-timed tenure as the Blackhawks’ top defensive prospect ended in abrupt fashion Tuesday.

The Hawks’ 2017 first-round draft pick (29th overall) was shipped to Buffalo in exchange for winger Alex Nylander, the Sabres’ 2016 first-round pick (8th overall).

Nylander, a 21-year-old Calgary native, has yet to break through in three professional seasons to date. He has appeared in just 19 NHL games, with three goals and three assists, and had decent but unremarkable production in three seasons with the AHL’s Rochester Americans.

“The Blackhawks organization [is] really good at developing players — they obviously know what they’re doing — and I’m just trying to do my best,” Nylander said. “Stuff that happened in Buffalo and Rochester is obviously in the past.”

Nylander brings valuable upside to an otherwise below-average group of Hawks forward prospects — newly signed first-round draft pick Kirby Dach notwithstanding.

It’s difficult. however, to see Nylander’s value as equivalent to Jokiharju’s. The Finnish blueliner showed great potential in 38 NHL games last season, a rare and exceptional performance for a 19-year-old defenseman. He led all Hawks defensemen in Corsi rating (54.1) and scoring chance percentage (51.9) and had 12 assists.

But with eight defensemen on one-way contracts after the acquisitions of Calvin de Haan and Olli Maatta earlier this offseason, and with a number of high-pedigree prospects — including fellow first-rounders Adam Boqvist and Nicolas Beaudin — coming up through the Hawks’ system, Jokiharju was caught in a disadvantageous spot.

“[With] the progression of a lot of our other young defensemen, to where we feel like we have built up a good stable of young players, now we have the ability to make a move like this,” general manager Stan Bowman said.

The trade solves that logjam somewhat but gives the Hawks an almost certainly lower-value player in return.

Nylander has two years left on his entry-level contract, with a negligible $863,333 cap hit, and will compete for a spot on the roster in training camp in September.

The range of possible outcomes is wide. If Nylander breaks through the taxi-squad ceiling this year, he could even land on the wing alongside Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews — a spot where other relatively unqualified candidates such as Dylan Sikura and Dominik Kubalik have been tentatively penciled in. That could launch Nylander into becoming the star play-making winger he was once thought certain to become, and that’s clearly what the Hawks hope happens. After all, they executed it brilliantly last season with Dylan Strome, another former top-10 pick in need of a scenery change.

“The one thing about Alex that’s appealing is that he’s had success playing left-hand right wing,” Bowman said. “With his offensive talent and his skill level, it’s certainly exciting to think of what he could do when you put him with some of the players that we have.”

That said, Nylander’s inability to secure a full-time spot on the Sabres’ weaker roster is a bad sign. If that pattern continues, Nylander could find himself stuck in Rockford for most of the season.