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Ryan S. Clark
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Greg Wyshynski
Connor Bedard is an 18-year-old who’s been billed as a franchise savior, the NHL’s next generational talent, and someone who is expected to win trophies ranging from rookie of the year to a Stanley Cup within the next decade.
Connor McDavid is familiar with these expectations. He was Bedard before there was a Bedard.
Cameras were ubiquitous before he was old enough to have a driver’s license. People had already mapped out what would happen in his career — before his first NHl game. Words such as “superstar” or even “future MVP” were thrown around during his rookie season.
When you face a previous phenom for the first time, the hockey world watches. Such is the case on Tuesday night, when the Chicago Blackhawks visit the Edmonton Oilers in what will be the first matchup between Bedard and McDavid (10 p.m. ET, ESPN).
McDavid said a player like Bedard has to “just tune out” the expectations placed on him.
“I’m sure he’s going to have to deal with that a little bit but it seems like he really has a good head on his shoulders,” McDavid told ESPN. “You get used to it. There’s a lot of noise your rookie year. In your draft year, a lot of people are talking about you as you go through the whole process. It’s lots of interviews, lots of media, lots of attention and stuff like that. You finally get back to playing. That’s what you love to do and that’s what you’re good at.”
Declarations were already being made about Bedard by those around the league before he even played his first game. McDavid, a three-time Hart Trophy winner, was left impressed by Bedard’s maturity. Colorado Avalanche center and Stanley Cup winner Nathan MacKinnon said he was probably the best 18-year-old he’d ever skated with, and already had one of the best shots in the NHL.
“I’ve met him a few times. A super mature kid,” MacKinnon said. “Obviously, he has a good head on his shoulders. I know that’s pretty generic but he does. He seems really mature. He’s really driven. He works super hard from what I can tell and I think he’s going to have a great year.”
Bedard is now nearly 30 games into his NHL career and has provided the sort of performances that justify why he’s been talked about for years. Already the Blackhawks top-line center, he leads them in goals, assists, points and ice time among forwards. The early favorite to win the Calder Trophy, he also leads this year’s rookie class in goals, assists and points.
He’s projected to score 35 goals and finish with 66 points. If those projections hold, only Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine would have scored more goals in their rookie seasons over the last decade. The 66 points would be tied for the fourth-most in a rookie season with Elias Pettersson. Mathew Barzal, Artemi Panarin and Matthews scored more.
Those are the short-term projections for Bedard. The long-term ones go beyond the stat sheet into the theoretical: Is he that good? Can he match the hype? Can he be the answer to his franchise’s revival and eventually lift the Stanley Cup?
These questions have been asked about other “generational talents” at the top of the draft, some of whom have experienced the same mania that’s followed Bedard into the NHL.
“Everyone has their own expectations coming in and obviously, like myself, mine was different with a guy like him,” New Jersey Devils center Jack Hughes said of Bedard. “Even Nico [Hischier]‘s was different from mine and whatnot. Everyone has their own experience. I think he’s done a really good job so far.”
How has Bedard been able to handle the pressure of his rookie season? What are the realistic expectations for him as an NHL star?
Before projecting ahead, it’s best to understand the journeys of other recent franchise players.
THERE ARE TWO types of first overall picks in the NHL draft. There are the best players on the board, who could blossom into star players and help a team turn its fortunes around; and then there is that next class of prospects who earn labels like “franchise savior” and “generational talent.”
Bedard falls squarely into that latter category, with recent first overall picks like McDavid, Matthews, Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. The kind of rookie who immediately changes the course for a franchise.
Much like Bedard in Chicago, Ovechkin immediately changed the vibes in Washington, D.C. for the 2005-06 season.
“When I first got there, you couldn’t give tickets away for the most part. As it went along, you could tell the crowds were getting bigger and the hype was growing,” said former Capitals winger Chris Clark, who is now director of player personnel for the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Bedard’s hype follows him on the road, where fans clamor to watch him. Clark remembers the same mania surrounding Ovechkin. “We’d go out west and be in warmups, and the whole building would be on one side of the ice to watch him,” he said.
This is where Clark sees the greatest comparison between Bedard and Ovechkin — the intense interest when a star rookie comes to town. “Every time he goes to a new city, it’s not just going to be the hockey writers covering him. It’s going to be the sports writers and the entertainment people. More and more reporters — not just like the normal five hockey [writers] that are there every time,” Clark said. “It’s an event. Even if you don’t like hockey, you’ve heard of him. It’s an event.”
Ovechkin hit the ice after playing professionally in Russia, which was one reason his rookie season was so dominant. Auston Matthews had the same advantage, playing with the ZSC Lions in Switzerland the season before he joined the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“You heard all the hype for sure about him. It was a cool thing for him to have played in Switzerland for his draft year. Like, I can only imagine if he was playing in college or somewhere else, where you’d have to deal with a lot more of that extra noise,” said Boston Bruins forward James van Riemsdyk, who was with the Leafs when Matthews arrived. “I feel like it was also nice for him to challenge himself on the ice there, too. To work on his game where it was a little bit quieter, in a sense.”
It was never quiet for first overall picks like Crosby, McDavid and Bedard, who were garnering Canadian media coverage as early teenage players.
Edmonton Oilers star Leon Draisaitl said one of the reasons why players such as Bedard and McDavid are able to handle such heavy expectations is the fact they have dealt with it long before they made it to the NHL.
“You just take it day by day. You stay in your little bubble and do what you do best and do what makes you feel comfortable,” Draisaitl said. “You find your pattern and you stick to that. You kind of block out all the expectations.”
Bedard’s first NHL game came against the Pittsburgh Penguins on opening night, where he assisted on a Ryan Donato goal for his first point. As phenom debuts went, it was solid and promising — even if it didn’t reach the level of Matthews’ historic first game, in which the Maple Leafs rookie set an NHL record with four goals.
“When you get four in the first game, I think the bar sort of changes a little bit,” van Riemsdyk said.
Hischier understands how hard it is to reach a bar set by other rookie phenoms, having gone No. 1 back in 2017 — which causes him to joke how he went first in the years after McDavid and Matthews.
“I had people asking me if I was going to score four goals in my first game,” Hischier said.
He was the first Swiss-born player to go No. 1 overall in the NHL draft. It was a landmark moment for a nation that’s still had fewer than 50 players reach the NHL. Hischier was even met with questions about if he could someday become the greatest Swiss hockey player of all time.
But even he admits, what Bedard is facing feels a bit more intense by comparison.
“I can’t even imagine what he is going through. … There is always going to be talk from people or on Twitter about you,” Hischier said. “I think it’s something that you have to try and just handle. Definitely not always easy. You will always get confronted with it even if you try to avoid it. But at the end of the day, we are professional athletes. Pressure can sometimes get to you and it happens to everyone. I think he’s doing pretty well and dealing with it the right way.”
Those “generational talents” have a different kind of hype than other No. 1 overall picks, and hence another level of expectations. But Draisaitl said it’s not what the outside world thinks that matters to elite talents.
“I don’t think anybody has higher expectations for themselves than the player,” he said. “I know for me, that is the case. I know for [McDavid], that is the case. There is no one who has higher expectations than himself.”
The Blackhawks are giving Bedard the chance to meet those expectations. The rest is on Bedard.
BEDARD IS ALREADY averaging more than 19 minutes per game, playing top-line minutes in 5-on-5 play while also logging significant time on the Blackhawks’ power-play unit. If Bedard’s 19:19 of average ice time sticks, it will rank as the fourth highest among rookie forwards since 2005-06, behind only Ovechkin (21:37), Anze Kopitar (20:32) and Crosby (20:08).
The NHL these stars broke into doesn’t resemble the one we see today. For one thing, the recent flat salary cap — and constraints on team payrolls in general — have resulted in more first-year players becoming instant contributors.
“The salary cap era has made it a younger league,” Avalanche defenseman Jack Johnson said. “However, I still think it’s a man’s game because it’s always the older teams that actually win. I think the perception of the league, I know, has gotten younger. They expect more out of the younger guys. … I think it’s probably unfair, but that’s the way it is.”
The other big difference between the current NHL and the one in which Crosby, Ovi and Kopitar grew up: offense. The average goals per team per game in Kopitar’s rookie season (2006-07) was 2.95; last season, it was 3.18, the highest average since the 1993-94 season.
MacKinnon said the NHL becoming a more offensive league will allow Bedard to get ice time that others might not have had in recent seasons. Back when MacKinnon was rookie in 2013-14, he averaged more than 17 minutes per game, while admitting there were nights when it felt like he was playing 12 minutes.
By comparison, Bedard has had only five games through Dec. 11 in which he played less than 17 minutes.
Bedard has used that time to become the league’s top rookie scorer, with 23 points in 27 games. He’s also a minus-14. Eight rookies have won the Calder Trophy with a plus/minus rating in negative double-digits. The last one to do so was Jonathan Huberdeau in 2012-13 with a minus-15 for the Florida Panthers.
Part of that stat for Bedard is playing for a very leaky defensive team, but his own defensive shortcomings have been called out by the analytics community as a counter-argument to his front-runner status. Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic, who ranked Bedard ninth among rookies, called his play without the puck “enough of a wart in his game to leave a window open in the Calder race.”
Clark remembers when Ovechkin would get those critiques as a young player, and they weren’t always invalid. “We were on a line together for a while. Sometimes he’d be standing next to me in the breakout. Sometimes he’d be up by the far blue line waiting for a puck,” he said.
The Capitals’ coach at the time was Glen Hanlon. His approach to getting Ovechkin to commit more defensively was to convince him that it would ultimately benefit his offense.
“Glen would tell him that you’re going to get more opportunities to score if you come back and get the puck and go with speed instead of standing still, getting the puck and trying to go by a guy,” Clark said. “That if you get the puck in the defensive zone, you’ve got a full runway to get moving and basically scare the hell out of the defense going forward.”
Clark said the message was that it’d be better for Ovechkin — and the team as a whole — if he played more consistent defense and was a “more well-rounded player” for the Capitals.
“The best thing about him was that he was so open-minded to all that stuff. In the five years I was with him, he cared so much about winning,” he said. “It looks like he cared about himself with the goals and all that stuff, he actually cared so much more about winning than anything he did as an individual. He put a lot of effort into making himself better. To make the team better.”
From coaches to teammates, the support was there for Ovechkin to round out his game. Infrastructure is important for a young star. Jack Johnson believes the Blackhawks have it around Bedard.
Johnson spent part of the 2022-23 season with the Blackhawks before he was traded back to the Avalanche. Johnson, who was the No. 3 pick in 2005, said there was an openness around the Blackhawks’ rebuild. He said the franchise worked to remain upbeat while striving to get better. Johnson said he never pulled into the parking lot with the fear it would be “miserable going into the rink.”
He said it’s a credit to Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson, along with coach Luke Richardson and their respective staffs.
“It’s huge in his development. It’s huge in his mental state,” Johnson said of Bedard. “That way, he wants to keep coming to the rink. You don’t get as good as he is or as good as people are saying he is without loving to be at the rink anyway. You want to keep that going and you want to keep his development and his growth going on the right path.”
That’s also why the Blackhawks tried to surround Bedard with veteran talent in the offseason, to varying degrees of success. Nick Foligno has contributed. Corey Perry had his contract terminated for what Chicago said was a violation of both the terms of his contract and the team’s internal policies that are “intended to promote professional and safe work environments.”
Their biggest swing was Taylor Hall, whom they acquired in a trade from the Boston Bruins right before drafting Bedard.
Hall provided the Hawks with a Hart Trophy-winning winger who could not only play alongside Bedard but could serve as a mentor, considering Hart was the No. 1 pick back in 2010. A five-time NHL All-Star, Hall sustained a knee injury in November that required him to undergo ACL surgery that is expected to keep him out for the rest of the season.
“It’s comforting to be able to bounce some questions off someone,” McDavid said of Hall during the preseason. “I know I did a little bit my first year with how to handle certain things. I’m sure Connor will do the same thing with Taylor. Being the first overall pick in Edmonton, he dealt with a lot of that as well. It’s comforting to know someone has walked in your shoes as well.”
Seattle Kraken center and reigning Calder Trophy winner Matty Beniers said one of the major reasons why he was able to enjoy his rookie season was the support system he had between the Kraken’s front office, their coaching staff and their players.
Playing with those veterans who had a vested interest in Beniers is something that he felt helped him when he made the transition from a star sophomore at the University of Michigan to being a top-six center who helped the Kraken reach the playoffs in their second season.
“But I think guys here, especially when you are younger, have a lot of expectations for yourself that exceed a lot of the expectations that people around you have,” Beniers said. “You try to give yourself some slack but you’ve been playing hockey your whole life where your expectations are high. Play well defensively. Play well offensively. They’re always there and they don’t really go away just because you’re young and playing against older guys.”
The key for a young player, said van Riemsdyk, is maintaining a level of excellence throughout a long NHL season, which is something he saw from Matthews.
“It’s hard to find that consistency over the course of a year. To pretty much be able to find it right away, to put up numbers and put up a 40-spot in your first year, that’s pretty incredible,” he said. “With him and guys that are in that tier [like Bedard], they always seem to rise to the moment and continue to find ways to hone their craft.”
And in Bedard’s case, his craft is his shot.
THERE ARE ATTRIBUTES for “generational talents” that become part of hockey lore before they even play an NHL game. There was Crosby’s ice vision. There was McDavid’s agility. For Bedard it was his shot, although he told ESPN that he never really contemplated how good it was.
“I mean, I always tried to score or whatever. I worked on it a lot, but never really thought about it that way. I think it’s all kind of putting in work on it,” Bedard said. “I watched a lot of Auston Matthews. I think he’s kind of pioneered a bit of it.”
Matthews was probably the last top prospect before Bedard whose shot was his calling card.
“It was definitely unique in the sense of how far he was able to change the release point of it. Change the angle of the shot,” van Riemsdyk said of Matthews. “Like, it seemed like he was able to find an extra six inches, pulling it almost in front of his feet to shoot. And I think that few extra inches just kind of had goalies not knowing where he was gonna go with it.”
Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn calls Bedard’s signature release “this new-school shot” in the NHL.
“They’re pulling the puck into themselves and then shooting. Or rather pushing it away from them and shooting. It’s not just shooting from a regular hockey stance position,” he explained. “It makes you a lot more dynamic. Especially to get shots through lanes and through guys who are trying to defend you under their sticks.”
Dunn has had one of the more unique experiences of any player in the NHL when it comes to Bedard.
Bedard and Dunn were part of the same offseason training group that worked with former NHL forward Gary Roberts in Toronto. Dunn said the group was composed of NHL players such as Draisaitl, Warren Foegele, Darnell Nurse, Steven Stamkos, Brandon Tanev, McDavid and other players from leagues such as the AHL.
“[Bedard] is working on his shot every single day. He skates, you can see his focus in drills, like the skates are over, he’s over on the other end working by himself on his shot as you’ve probably seen in all the videos on Twitter,” he said. “Then, when he gets home, he’s stickhandling in his driveway. It tells me he’s really addicted to hockey.”
Dunn went so far as to say that Bedard is “obsessed” with hockey.
“That’s what he thinks about all day: How he can better himself,” Dunn said. “He’s pretty hard on himself. You have to be careful with that without having too many ups or downs. … But listening to him in the summer, he was always trying to work on his game. Literally from morning until night, all he was doing was hockey things.”
This was true to Crosby, whom longtime Penguins equipment manager Dana Heinze once said “eats, lives and breathes hockey.”
This was true of McDavid, who said his childhood room had a “pretty embarrassing” amount of hockey memorabilia.
McDavid is 26. He now faces opponents who grew up watching him play. Who had his poster on their walls.
“Certainly makes me feel a little bit older,” McDavid said. “We got to spend some time this summer up at Gary Roberts’ gym, training with Connor Bedard. And, you know, watching him go through the draft and the whole process was definitely bringing me back to 2015 and my whole experience there.”
His advice to Bedard, from one phenomenal Connor to another?
“I would say just to enjoy it, actually. It goes by really fast. Here I am going into my ninth year, but it feels like it has flown by,” he said.
There’s always pressure to exceed expectations and win the Stanley Cup. But McDavid said it’s important to savor the journey as much as the destination for Bedard.
“I know he’s such a competitive kid that he wants nothing but good things for his team and himself. But at the same time, he is living out his dream. Sometimes you have to acknowledge yourself a little bit for that,” he said. “It’s a special thing to play in our league, and he’s getting a chance to do that. Just sit back and acknowledge that.”