Connor Bedard is the 37th captain in Blackhawks history now, made official today, and I love how much pressure that piles onto a 21-year-old who can’t even play right now. Chicago named him captain as the second-youngest captain in franchise history behind Jonathan Toews, and the timing tells you exactly what this is.
This isn’t a reward for what Bedard’s already done. It’s a bet that the rebuild Chicago has been building around him actually pays off three years from now, with a fanbase that’s going to hold him to every shift of it starting the second he’s cleared to play.
Bedard had been wearing an alternate “A” since the trade deadline, back when the Blackhawks shipped out Nick Foligno, Connor Murphy and Jason Dickinson and left the room without a real captain for the first time in years. So this was coming.
Chicago wasn’t going to hand the full letter to a depth defenseman while its actual franchise player watched from the tunnel.
And what a season to earn it with. Bedard put up 75 points (30 goals, 45 assists) in 69 games, the third Blackhawk ever to hit 30 goals before turning 21, and the first player in franchise history to reach 200 career points before his 21st birthday. Toews and Kane never got there that fast; nobody in more than a century of this organization has.
That much was already telegraphed by the five-year, $75 million extension he signed in July — you don’t hand out $75 million and then not also hand out the letter two months later.
None of it changes that Bedard is currently rehabbing a left shoulder surgery from a training injury in Vancouver, targeting a November return — his third significant injury in under four years in Chicago, after a fractured jaw as a rookie and a separate right shoulder issue this past December. The guy tasked with ending a six-year playoff drought is going to open his captaincy in a suit.
GM Kyle Davidson said Bedard “perfectly embodies what it means to be a Blackhawk,” which is what GMs say about everybody right before they trade them. Bedard’s own response read a lot more real: “an unbelievable honor and something I’m truly humbled by.”
https://twitter.com/NHLBlackhawks/status/2099853339282243591
My Rangers have spent the better part of a decade auditioning captains who never fully earned the room’s trust. Chicago just skipped the audition entirely and stapled the whole rebuild to a 21-year-old’s locker before he’s proven he can stay healthy for one full season.
Ask me again in three years.
Or whenever that shoulder lets him find out if he’s actually built for this.
