Connor Bedard

Last Season

Thirty goals and 45 assists in 69 games — 75 points, minus-18, at 20:52 a night. Two hundred and twenty-six shots on goal. He turned 20 in July.

The Finesse Game

The release is the thing, and it is already among the best in the sport: he changes the angle and the speed of the puck in the same motion, and goaltenders have to respect a shot from ice where nobody else is a threat.

The passing has caught up faster than expected. Forty-five assists on a club that finished thirty-second in even-strength expected goals means he is manufacturing offence out of nothing, repeatedly, with linemates who cannot finish.

The one criticism the shot chart supports: only 25 per cent of his unblocked attempts came from inside twenty feet, median 30. He shoots from distance because he has to — there is nobody to give it to and nobody screening — but the habit is forming either way.

The Physical Game

Five foot ten, 190, and stronger on the puck than that suggests. Fifty penalty minutes is a young star who has worked out that nobody is going to protect him.

He gets hit constantly and keeps coming back, which is the part of his makeup people underrate.

The Intangibles

The on-ice numbers are dreadful — 42.8 per cent of the expected goals, sixth percentile — and they are close to meaningless. Chicago was 45.6 per cent as a club, worst in the league; every skater in this section sits in the bottom fifth, and Bedard played the hardest minutes of any of them.

The goals went 34-53 against him while the expected goals went 45.9 to 61.4. He was drowning with everyone else.

Nine points in his last ten. Seventy-five points at 20 on a team this bad is the most impressive individual season in this book, and it will be years before the numbers underneath say so.