Ever since he was granted exceptional status in March 2020, there has been non-stop hype surrounding Connor Bedard.

Throughout his junior career, Bedard lived up to that hype. He accumulated 134 goals and 271 points in just 134 games in the WHL, and after a modest first showing at the 2022 World Juniors where he only had four goals and eight points in seven games, he reached a whole other level just a few months later at the 2023 tournament with nine goals and 23 points in seven games.

That play made Bedard the indisputable first-overall selection in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft, and the Chicago Blackhawks were lucky enough to be the team to get that pick. While many expected him to blow the doors off in his first season, he had a merely excellent rookie campaign with 22 goals and 61 points in 68 games. It wasn’t quite at the same level as what generational players like Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid did in their rookie seasons, but it was still the 10th-highest points per game rate among rookies in the salary cap era, and it earned him the Calder Trophy.

In the offseason, the Blackhawks made sure to add some more offensive weapons like Tyler Bertuzzi and Teuvo Teravainen (not to mention that Taylor Hall would be playing more than 10 games this season) to ensure that Bedard’s top linemates wouldn’t be Philipp Kurashev and Nick Foligno. Combine that with the natural progression he would make in his second season, and many expected a 2024-25 that would truly establish Bedard as one of the league’s best.

And yet, Bedard has left a lot to be desired through 28 games. He has just 21 points on the year, a 0.75 points per game that is a step back from last year’s 0.9, but even more disappointing has been his goal total. His shot was one of the most exciting aspects of his game, and this year he has just five goals.

So what’s exactly happening with Bedard this season?

The first place you always have to look when a player is underperforming is how unlucky they have been. From that perspective, Bedard has certainly been unluckier this season. His 7.25% shooting percentage is a step down from his 10.68%, and at 5v5, it’s even more drastic, with his 6.25% shooting% being a far cry from his 11.68% that he hit last season.

The only issue with using individual shooting luck is that shooting percentage is less fixed than it was 10 years ago. With players being a lot more skilled, and that creating more variance in the shooting talent of players, judging shooting percentage should be based on the player’s career average rather than a fixed league-wide norm.

In Bedard’s case, we still don’t know where that is this early on in his career. He could be a career 6-7% shooter or a career 10-11% shooter or somewhere in between, and while it’s likely on the higher end of that spectrum, we need more of a sample size from Bedard to know for sure.

As for Bedard’s on-ice shooting (which factors in the shooting of all teammates on the ice), it’s taken a slight step back, but not by enough that it’s anything of note. His all-strengths on-ice shooting% of 10.89 isn’t a huge drop off from the 11.55, and at 5v5, it’s 7.59% compared to 8.73%. Knowing that, it makes sense that his 0.571 assists per game this season is almost identical to his 0.565 assists per game last season. It’s so close, I had to put in a third decimal place to show the slight difference.

So, his teammates are still scoring, it’s just that he can’t. The next thing you can look at is how many expected goals he’s generating. Last season, he had a 0.98 goals per 60 minutes at all strengths, and 0.92 per 60 at 5v5, and in terms of expected goals, he generated 1.13 at all strengths and 0.94 at 5v5, which meant he was scoring below expected by -0.15 and -0.02 goals per 60 at the respective game states. That was relatively in the same ballpark, but it also hinted that maybe Bedard could have been even better last season with a bit more goal-scoring luck on the power play.

This season, there is more of a gap between Bedard’s goal and expected goal generation, as he is scoring -0.29 goals per 60 below expected at all strengths and -0.31 goals below expected at 5v5, so he should see some improvement there. But the problem is that the rate at which he is generating expected goals is down as well. At all strengths, he’s generating just 0.82 expected goals per 60, and at 5v5, it’s just 0.72, a drop off of 0.31 and 0.22 from last season at those respective game states. So even if he was generating goals at the exact same rate as his expected goals, he would be scoring at a pace of just 18 goals in 68 games, compared to the 22 he scored last year at that pace.

Sometimes players sacrifice a bit of their offense in order to improve defensively, but that is also not the case for Bedard. Among the 315 forwards who have played at least 250 minutes at 5v5 this season, Bedard is tied for 217th in defensive goals above replacement with -0.6, and ranks 276th in expected goals against per 60 with Evolving Hockey’s regularized-adjusted plus/minus model with 0.131. That’s not horrible, but it certainly doesn’t showcase that he’s trying to improve his defensive game at the expense of his offense.

Some of his struggles can probably come down to how Bedard hasn’t played with consistent linemates all season. He’s played 435:37 this season at 5v5, and yet he hasn’t spent more than 41% of ice time with any single player, with Teravainen having the most overlap at 40.3% of those minutes. After that, Kurashev is the only player above 30%, while Foligno and Hall are around 25%.

What’s most surprising is the fact that Bedard and Bertuzzi have played so little together. Bertuzzi has been on for just 11.5% of Bedard’s 5v5 minutes, which seems unusual considering that the power forward style of play that Bertuzzi provides seems tailor-made for Bedard, much like what Bertuzzi has provided in the past alongside John Tavares, William Nylander, David Pastrnak, Dylan Larkin, and Lucas Raymond.

Pretty much any line combination that Bedard has spent any amount of time with this season has not had three players who are considered solid offensive threats. While he has played with Teravainen, Hall and Bertuzzi at various points of the season, he’s only played with two of those three for 52:06 of ice time this year. Usually, these lines have also included Foligno, Kurashev, Ryan Donato, Ilya Mikheyev, Jason Dickinson or Joey Anderson.

I understand wanting to spread your offense amongst your roster to make matchups tougher, but it’s clearly not working for both Bedard and the Blackhawks this season, so you might as well at least try loading up that top line for a significant stretch. Sure, this is what we’ve seen with other generational players like Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid over the years, but Bedard has to show that he’s at that level before you give him those kinds of minutes.

It also doesn’t help that the Blackhawks haven’t been playing too many of their other top prospects in the NHL alongside him. Crosby had Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang alongside him in the early years, and McDavid had Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle growing alongside him.

Only four Blackhawks draft picks in the past five years have played more than 50 games in the NHL (excluding Bedard): Kevin Korchinski, Lukas Reichel, Wyatt Kaiser and Isaak Phillips. Reichel is the only forward, Phillips is currently not on the roster, and Kaiser is the only other one playing not on the bottom line or pair.

It’s also important to note that development in the NHL is not linear. Not everyone goes from an 87-point pace to 100 points in their sophomore season like McDavid, or from 102 points to 120 like Crosby. There is one player that currently sits within the threshold of being a generational talent that did find himself in a similar situation, if not worse, to Bedard’s. For now, I’ll keep him unknown and call him Player X.

In Bedard’s rookie season, he had 22 goals and 61 points. Player X’s rookie season saw him get 24 goals and 63 points in 14 more games. Both players were first overall picks, and both won the Calder Trophy with those performances. In Player X’s sophomore season, he managed just 14 goals and 38 points in 64 games. If Bedard continues at this pace to 64 games, he actually has 11 goals and 48 points. Player X went on to score 52 and 53 points in the following seasons.

Have you guessed who this mystery player is yet? Well if you haven’t, it’s Nathan MacKinnon.

What’s often forgotten about MacKinnon’s career is how he was just a “pretty good” player through the first four years. There’s a reason he was on that steal of a contract from 2016 to 2023 making $6.3 million a year, and that’s because he was playing like a player worth 8.63% of his team’s salary cap at the time. But then in his fifth season, he had 39 goals and 97 points in 74 games, and he’s never had a season below 1.2 points per game after that.

There are two things to take away from this comparison. First, the Blackhawks might have an opportunity to lock up Bedard to a steal of a contract if he plays at a really good, but not best-in-the-league level for the next year or two. If we apply MacKinnon’s initial cap hit percentage of his contract to the 2024-25 salary cap, that would mean Bedard would be on a $7.5 million cap hit. If you want to adjust for the projected $92.4 million number for next season thrown around by Gary Bettman on Tuesday (which would be in the window for Bedard’s extensions), it’s $7.97 million. This is assuming that Bedard would want to sign after a slow year, but that would be a great scenario for Chicago.

Secondly, not every franchise-altering superstar hits the ground running to start their career. MacKinnon is often considered the second-best player in the league right now, but he was nowhere close to that level through his first four seasons. Just because Bedard hasn’t blown us away this year, it doesn’t mean that he won’t down the road.

But even then, there are some situational issues within the Blackhawks that have hindered Bedard a bit this season. They just changed their head coach a week ago, so perhaps that has an impact (he has two points in two games so far under Anders Sorensen, but no goals). It is possible that we can see a whole new level of Bedard even this season, but outside of a bit of good luck going his way, it’s not going to just happen on its own.