Twin rarities greeted Connor Bedard on Tuesday in the forms of a tweet and a media gathering.
The first, from Lululemon, announced Bedard as an ambassador for the clothing brand before he has so much as stepped foot on NHL ice or officially knows the team for whom he will play.
Unofficially, though, you need not wait for Gary Bettman to announce that Bedard will go to the Chicago Blackhawks as the No. 1 pick on Wednesday night, the right to draft the 17-year-old having been the reason driving a sustained year of tanking among the league’s bottom feeders.
In the NHL, where player marketing is a punch line even among players, a Canadian phenom being deemed recognizable enough to endorse not Nike or Adidas but a retailer best known for comfy pants counts as noteworthy — granted, a retailer that is based in Bedard’s home city of Vancouver.
The second involved Bedard sitting at a podium at the AllianceBernstein Tower in Nashville, Tenn., taking questions from reporters — a benign gathering noteworthy only for its scale.
While a group of high-profile prospects was made available all at once on a roof deck, chatting to a handful of people at a time, Bedard required something more formal: a dais, a microphone, a moderator, a slot after everyone else.
This was, presumably, out of convenience to all involved — particularly Bedard, who by now has heard all of these questions 10 times over.
Of a season in which he scored 71 goals and assisted 72 on more with the Western Hockey League’s Regina Pats while leading Canada to World Junior Championship gold with a staggering 23 points in seven games, he said: “I had a lot of fun, first and foremost, that’s what matters most.”
Of the goals he’s set for himself, he said: “First of all, make the team of course. That’s the No. 1 goal.”
That all tracked with the image of himself Bedard has crafted over recent months, most notably in an on-ice interview with TSN after winning the World Juniors MVP.
“I don’t want to talk about myself,” he said then. “We’re not talking about me. We just won the biggest tournament in the world and, man, I love this team, this country.”
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Bedard, like his basketball top-pick counterpart Victor Wembanyama — who he described as a “special player,” if you were wondering — is expected to catapult a rebuilding franchise whose hard times have been brief compared to the championships that preceded them.
The last time the Blackhawks picked first overall was in 2007.
They selected Patrick Kane, who only went on to place himself squarely in the argument for greatest American player of all time while helping Chicago to Stanley Cup victories in 2010, 2013 and 2015.
Those moments, 2010 especially, were marred by the revelations brought forth by Kyle Beach, a former minor leaguer in Chicago’s system who alleged he had been sexually assaulted by video coordinator Brad Aldrich, with the allegations being grossly mishandled by a group that included coach Joel Quenneville and general manager Stan Bowman.
Quenneville and Bowman, both of whom had moved onto different jobs by the time Beach went public in October 2021, were promptly exiled from hockey.
But the franchise escaped with only a $2 million fine, even as owner Rocky Wirtz got into more trouble by angrily responding to fan questions about the scandal at a town hall in early 2022.
Chicago settled a lawsuit with Beach in December 2021.
The Blackhawks, thusly, are set to accelerate their return to relevance by selecting Bedard, whose run of success between the Western Hockey League’s Regina Pats and Team Canada at the World Junior Championships suggests he could be the Mantle to Kane’s DiMaggio.
In a 13-minute gathering on Tuesday that brimmed with modesty, though, the crowning moment was when Bedard described playing in the NHL by saying, “It’s still my dream. So, hope to achieve that.”
As dreams go, this one does seem to be on track.
