The NHL 15: Connor Bedard is doing just fine, even if his franchise isn't

Before each NHL season I look at 15 players that I think are the most intriguing players in the NHL. Not necessarily the best players (though, sometimes they are), but players that offer some sort of intrigue, a big storyline or figure to be a major X-factor for the season. This is The NHL 15. We continue today with Connor Bedard, whose career is off to a fine start individually even if the rest of the team around him is terrible.

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Connor Bedard was one of those prospects. The prospect that teams were willing to punt an entire season for in the hopes he could come in and become the franchise cornerstone for the next 15 years and lead the team to glory. He might still be that player. But two years into his career the Chicago Blackhawks are showing the dangers in tanking a full season, tearing your organization down to the studs, and then trying to rebuild it all back up.

When you tear a team down that far, and when you are as badly managed as the Blackhawks were and have been for so many years (and I’m counting the end of the Stan Bowman era in that, because that shit was BAD), you are creating a lot of holes that are going to take a lot of years to fix.

It is going to take either a lot of patience to get through the years it will take to build it back up, or a lot of luck to surround that No. 1 pick with the type of complementary cast of players that can create a winning environment.

Or both.

Either way, one player is never going to be enough to be a cure-all in the NHL.

A quarterback might change an NFL team’s outlook relatively quickly if they are an instant star.

A great point-guard or superstar scorer might change an NBA team relatively quickly because one player can take over basketball games with regularity due to how much of the game they can play and how everything can run through them for 40-plus minutes.

But one hockey player is not going to be that much of a difference-maker in the short-term or long-term unless it’s a goalie. And even then there’s a ceiling with what they can do. The best forwards and defensemen are only playing a third of the game. Even the highest-scoring forwards are going to have games, and stretches of games, where they do not show up on the scoresheet. You need A LOT around them to make up for that.

Right now Bedard has absolutely nothing around him in Chicago except more young players that the Blackhawks are trying to convince their fans will be good (they might be; but not all of them will be) and a rag-tag collection of veterans that can be politely described as “mid.”

Look at this roster. Who is the second-best player on it after Bedard?

If you go simply by point production, the second, third and fourth-leading scorers a year ago were Ryan Donato, Teuvo Teravainen and Tyler Bertuzzi.

Yawn.

Frank Nazar COULD be that guy, and the Blackhawks obviously believe in him enough to have already given him a long-term contract extension, but he’s only played in 56 NHL games. Like many of the Blackhawks’ young players he remains a mystery and a wild-card.

It is not really an ideal situation. Nothing about this is ideal.

Keep in mind that the Blackhawks were worse in the second year of Bedard’s career and won fewer games than they did in the year before he arrived when they were trying to tank for him. That’s almost impossible to do, and the roster this season doesn’t really look much better unless a couple of young guys REALLY erupt.

Just look at some of the supporting casts that some other recent No. 1 overall picks had going into year three of their careers.

• Sidney Crosby was playing on a team with Evgeni Malkin and Sergei Gonchar.

• Alex Ovechkin had Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Green and Alexander Semin.

• Steven Stamkos had Vincent Lecavalier, Martin St. Louis and Victor Hedman.

• Connor McDavid had Leon Draisaitl.

• Auston Matthews had Mitch Marner, William Nylander and Morgan Rielly.

• Nathan MacKinnon had Gabriel Landeskog and Matt Duchene.

• Hell, you only have to go back to the previous Blackhawks rebuild that was successful, and by year three Patrick Kane had Jonathan Toews, Marian Hossa, Patrick Sharp, Brian Campbell and Duncan Keith on his team.

Some of those secondary players were young and already somewhat proven themselves over at least a full season. Some of them were established veterans that were top-line players. The bottom line is they were really, really good players and legitimate building block players.

The Blackhawks are giving Bedard a bunch of completely unproven young players and a bunch of roster-filler.

When reading The Athletic’s player tiers for the 2025-26 season on Thursday they had Bedard in the Tier 4 section, with this write-up:

One coach laid it plain: "Bedard might have the most pressure on him of anybody in the league. I think he's right where he should be. But why (shouldn't he be) higher? What are we waiting for?"

“I have no interest in watching that team, and he's on it. And that’s not good.”

In some regards, that's criticism of Chicago's front office. It's fair, though, to pin some of it on Bedard, too. His skill from the blue line in remains undeniable — one exec called his shot "absolutely insane" — but high-end, elite forwards create offense themselves. It's a prerequisite, and Bedard has not yet met it.

The fundamental issue, a different coach said, is that Bedard needs to either improve as a puck transporter or Chicago needs to add one to his line. How that is (or is not) resolved will dictate quite a bit, including Bedard's placement on lists like this.

I think there’s a lot of fairness there, especially as it relates to the line of “I have no interest in watching that team, and he’s on it.”

That is bad.

Really bad.

But I do think some of the questions regarding Bedard are a little unfair when you take into account the context that he played two full seasons in the NHL as a teenager and had nothing but slop around him.

Can you really be hard on a 19-year-old for not making Tyler Bertuzzi and Ryan Donato interesting?

Let’s talk more about all of that.