🏒 Connor Bedard — Canada’s next hockey hope — isn’t yet an NHL star
My Week in Sport(s) 🏒 🏀 ⚽️ 🏉 🏏
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: 🏒 Connor Bedard, 🏀 Luka Dončić, ⚽️ Spain, 🏉 Joseph Sua’ali’i and 🏏 Dewald Brevis.
🏒 Connor Bedard — Canada’s next hockey hope — isn’t yet an NHL star
The 4 Nations Face-Off — a short tournament reviving ‘best-on-best’ international competition in men’s ice hockey ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy — is taking place this week, during the NHL’s midseason break.
19-year-old forward Connor Bedard was a feature of early projected rosters for Canada, in anticipation of him ascending to the league’s elite soon after being drafted. In reality, he wasn’t close to making the cut. Bedard’s NHL career has been far from disastrous: as one of the youngest players in the league, he’s contributing fairly frequently to the Chicago Blackhawks’ scoring efforts — with little talent supporting him — and shown signs that he can effectively move the puck up the ice for his team.
Right now, though, he’s nowhere near as influential as the other offensive-minded forwards he would have had to overtake in order to make Team Canada. Given that he was seen as a once-in-a-generation prospect, Bedard’s current trajectory might seem relatively disappointing. What’s happened? Watching any of his junior-hockey highlight reels, the first thing you notice is his laser of a shot. In the NHL, however, he’s simply not been able to get as many pucks on goal as we might have expected.
The chart above shows — on a 20-game rolling basis — the number of shots on goal per 60 minutes recorded by NHL forwards picked in the top five of the last three drafts. Bedard’s current rate of 6.5 shots per 60 certainly doesn’t stand out among this cohort of highly talented young players. More worrying for the Blackhawks will be the fact that he’s fallen off from the rate he was able to sustain last season — and that there’s been a similar drop in his goalscoring rate at even strength during 2024-25.
His shot rate has improved since hitting a career-low level just before Christmas, and Chicago will be hoping it continues to trend upwards after their recent change of head coach. For now, his franchise still trusts that he’ll figure his game out — and that he’ll eventually have the sort of impact that star centres Crosby, MacKinnon and McDavid have had during their NHL careers. Given how much talent Canada can call upon at his position, though, it might be 2030 before Bedard appears on the Olympic stage.
🏀 Luka Dončić’s early exposure to professional basketball has been both a blessing and a curse
‘Where is the Pass Going?’ — a quiz by the the New York Times which challenges you to guess where various NBA playmakers sent the basketball next in real-life scenarios — is one of my favourite pieces of interactive journalism.
Some of the best athletes in the world have to play a version of this game whenever Luka Dončić has the ball in his hands on an NBA court. Their answers often aren’t much better than ours, either. (An example: this pass he threw in his Los Angeles Lakers debut on Tuesday.) Many analysts think that the 6ft 6in Dončić picks passes as well as anyone in the league — and a significant contributing factor to that is likely to be the extensive experience he has making those reads in elite pro competition.
Dončić had accumulated around 50 ‘true’ games of experience at the highest levels of basketball by his age-18 season; this is something none of his real peers — other first-team All-NBA players — could claim. But they’ve caught up with him: in the NBA, Dončić has never been able to keep himself fit enough to play a full regular season. Early exposure to the top can certainly accelerate your technical development; if you don’t look after your body, though, it may come at an additional physical cost.
What else I learned last week
⚽️ Heading into Wembley test, Spain may have patched up their defence
While England are heading into July’s Euro 2025 campaign as defending champions, Spain will likely be the team to beat. The two sides will meet before the tournament comes around, too — in a Nations League fixture at Wembley in two weeks’ time.
That said, Spain’s level might have dropped since winning the World Cup in 2023. They only managed a fourth-place finish at last year’s Olympics, and their defence looked rather porous. Per Sofascore, they had only 57% of the ‘big chances’ in their games in Paris; in their eight competitive games before that tournament, they managed a 76% share. This rebounded to 93% in the friendlies they played — against weaker opposition — late last year, but the Lionesses at home will be a sterner test.
🏉 Joseph Sua’ali’i brings elite offloading skills with him to rugby union
While the Six Nations takes this weekend off, the rugby union season in Australia and New Zealand is getting underway. Australia have struggled in recent years against their neighbours — but, at the end of 2024, they added a true box-office player.
Joseph Sua’ali’i switched codes from rugby league late last year, and one skill stood out: his ability to offload the ball. He was good at this in the NRL — with offloads on 9.4% of his runs in 2024, he ranked 10th among backs — but his passing out of contact already seems like more of a point of difference in union. He completed offloads on four of his 14 carries in the November Internationals, per Oval; in those games, other Australian backs made 190 carries between them — and just 10 offloads.
🏏 Dewald Brevis was the best boundary-hitter in this year’s SA20
This year’s SA20 — South Africa’s top men’s T20 league — concluded last Saturday. Winners MI Cape Town were aided by a bumper season from Dewald Brevis, who is establishing himself three years after breaking out at the U19 Cricket World Cup.
Back in 2023, I borrowed from basketball and proposed ‘Effective Boundary %’ — which accounts for the additional value of ‘sixes’ over ‘fours’ — as a useful metric for assessing the key skill for T20 batters. It illustrates Brevis’ development nicely: after two seasons where his performance by this measure was almost exactly average, he took a leap in 2025. His effective boundary rate this year was 35% — 14 points higher than other batters in his matches, and easily the highest mark in the whole league.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Friday February 28th.
Some additional context on Bedard's shots per game numbers, his power play time per game is down quite a bit from last season, which is definitely having an effect. But his even strength shot rate is down quite a bit and his quality of teammates is actually higher this season than last, so that should be a bit concerning for Chicago.