Best case
Best case
Connor Bedard is a once-a-decade NHL prospect. What would it take to live up to the hype?
Welcome to the 27th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
Ice hockey can sometimes seem a bit impenetrable to sports fans who are unfamiliar with it; back in April, I tried to frame it more accessibly by focusing on the power play — an aspect which sometimes resembles football. But another way in to thinking about the sport is simply to expose yourself to the players who can do things which anyone can marvel at. With the 2023-24 NHL regular season set to begin tonight, the hockey world is wondering whether another of those players has just landed.
Connor Bedard is a once-a-decade NHL prospect. What would it take to live up to the hype?
With some justification, the sports analytics community tends to be pretty sceptical of fans hyping up particular prospects as the ‘next big thing’.
But I’ve started to think about paying attention to highly touted young players before they’ve hit the top as a sort of venture investment strategy: the majority of your bets won’t come through, but the cost of the time you’ve devoted will be more than paid off by the deeper understanding and appreciation you’ll have of the few who do go on to become game-changing superstars.
Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself in this year of ‘generational’ rookies across a number of the major North American men’s sports leagues.
Over the summer, we spent a bit of time looking into French basketball super-prospect Victor Wembanyama’s unique blend of size and skill.
While his NBA career will be getting underway in a few weeks’ time, in truth I’m almost more excited about watching Connor Bedard — Canada’s latest hockey phenom — hit the NHL for the first time.
Last time we checked in on Bedard — who was selected first overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in June’s NHL Draft — he was coming off age-15 and -16 seasons in junior hockey which put him in elite company.
He then proceeded to absolutely obliterate underage competition in his draft year — capped off with a historic performance at the World Juniors for Canada1.
Barring something unforeseen, Bedard will now become one of the youngest skaters to play a significant role on an NHL team this century.
On 31 January 2024 — the reference date at which Hockey Reference calculates player ages for each NHL season — he will still have the best part of another six months to go before he turns 19.
Since 2000-01, only three players younger than that have played more than 40 NHL games in a season2.
How, then, should we come up with a benchmark for Bedard’s performance as an 18-year-old in the toughest league in the world? And — dreaming big for a moment — what would be his absolute best-case outcome?
There are now some more advanced models of player performance derived from NHL box scores3 for recent seasons, but basic counting statistics like goals and assists are still useful as a rough proxy4.
However, it’s important to use them judiciously. There are really two parts to putting up big individual numbers in any sport: being given the opportunity to perform, and then using that opportunity productively.
Bedard will be about the same age as Sidney Crosby — another former ‘Next One’ — was in his debut season with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2005-06.
And Crosby inarguably ticked both boxes in his first year in the NHL. He took on a massive workload — playing the second-most minutes per game of any 18- or 19-year-old rookie since 2000 — but his productivity was even more impressive.
Compared to other rookies who have been exposed to the league that young this century, his first-year performance was out of this world. Crosby recorded 3.8 points per 60 minutes played that season — 0.4 points per 60 more than any other young rookie has been able to manage over the last couple of decades.
Bedard may get a similar opportunity in terms of time on the ice — but can he realistically match this level of production in year one?
Given the number of exceptionally talented players who have fallen short of Crosby — and still gone on to have superb NHL careers — it would be truly remarkable for the Blackhawks rookie to meet his standard.
Even hitting the level of Connor McDavid’s rookie year would be impressive — and the current undisputed best player in the world could only match 90% of Crosby’s per-minute output5.
Productivity is obviously partly dependent on the teammates your organisation puts around you, and in Bedard’s case there are concerns about the support he will have at the Blackhawks.
And there are also a number of question marks about his size and skating ability: he is smaller than a typical NHL forward, and is not an absolutely elite skater like McDavid is.
The rookie-year output of a player like Patrick Kane6 — himself a first-overall pick by the Blackhawks in 2007 — might then be a more realistic scenario for Bedard; he is one of a handful of players in this age bracket who returned around 2.9 points per 60 minutes in their first season7.
But we all know that with prospects it is the hope that is intoxicating.
Leagues and media companies are clearly wise to this too — and that’s why, in his first career NHL game, Bedard will be facing off against his “favorite player growing up”: Crosby.
For the reasons we’ve explored, we shouldn’t be too expectant of Bedard immediately hitting equivalent heights as an 18-year-old in his first exposure to top-level hockey.
But players like Crosby are examples of why it’s sometimes worth buying into a little bit of prospect hype.
And — regardless of whether Bedard does light it up from the off — ‘analytics’ will have helped us understand just how exceptional such performances are in context.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
To reiterate, he was 17 years old when he did this to the best 20-year-old hockey players in the world.
Jordan Staal, Aleksander Barkov and Nathan MacKinnon — in that order — are the three.
Dom Luszczyszyn’s ‘game score’ metrics — published at The Athletic — are some of the most prominent.
He also played in only the 45 games in 2015-16 before suffering a season-ending injury; Crosby played 81 in 2006-07. For additional context: McDavid has averaged between 4.2 and 5.1 points per 60 in each of the last four seasons — roughly equivalent to between 1.1x and 1.3x Crosby’s rookie-season output.
According to The Athletic’s NHL draft expert Corey Pronman, there are aspects in which they are similar players — “the skating, size and skill fit” — but also important stylistic differences: “Kane is an elite playmaker and Bedard an elite goal scorer”.
Also around this mark: Patrik Laine, Auston Matthews and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.