Connor Bedard's first NHL season lived up to the hype. What will Year 2 bring?

It was one of those empty auxiliary rooms that every modern arena has near the dressing room — bigger than a storage closet, smaller than a meeting room. One of those rooms where a player can find a little quiet for his pregame routine, or quickly duck into so he can FaceTime his kids after a morning skate. A different kind of escape room, if you will. A place for a little solitude.

But in the late morning of Oct. 10, 2023, there was no solitude to be found in there. Heck, there was barely any oxygen to breathe. About 30 people had crammed into that space beside the visitors’ locker room at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena, several of them armed with bulky cameras, the rest with phones, microphones and digital recorders. Sweat beaded on nearly every brow as each of them strained to capture some audio, to see, to hear, to be heard.

Wedged in at the center of all this, with all those cameras and devices pointed straight at his face, was a young man of 18 years, two months and 23 days.

This was the morning of Connor Bedard’s first NHL game. And the scene repeated itself the next evening in Boston. Then, hoo boy, Montreal and Toronto. This, after a summer of unprecedented attention — before the draft, at the draft, after the draft. At training camp, he attracted crowds of both fans and reporters that hadn’t been seen in Chicago since the heyday of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews. He was pulled in every direction by national television rightsholders, by corporate partners, by team content creators, by autograph seekers.

Sometimes, the hockey seemed secondary.

“I don’t think the NHL did him any favors with that schedule last year,” said Chicago Blackhawks forward Taylor Hall, who knows a little something about the subject, having been dropped into the Edmonton cauldron as the No. 1 draft pick in 2010. “That was really hard on all of us, to be honest with you. When you factor in the pressure he was facing — (Sidney) Crosby the first game, then it was Montreal, Toronto, Colorado. It was just a lot.”

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It’ll always be a lot. That’s life as a star athlete. Fame brings glory and riches, but it also brings obligations and demands and scrutiny. Bedard was the center of attention nearly everywhere he went last season, the Blackhawks’ abysmal record doing little to quell the public’s fascination with the most hyped NHL prospect since Connor McDavid, since maybe forever.

But a funny thing happened over the summer: It stopped. Well, paused, more accurately. After the most ridiculous, wildest two years of his life, Bedard finally found some of that peace and solitude.

“I didn’t do an interview for a couple of months,” he said with a wry smile. “Which was unbelievable.”

Bedard is no longer the NHL’s novelty act, an object of curiosity. He’s 19 now. He’s got 68 NHL games under his belt. He’s scored 22 goals and handed out 39 assists — trailing only Crosby and McDavid in points per game as an 18-year-old. The curiosity now turns to San Jose’s Macklin Celebrini and Philadelphia’s Matvei Michkov.

Bedard? He’s just another NHL superstar now.

Bedard, who’s as skilled at guarding his true emotions in a media scrum as he is at disguising his release point on the ice, perked up at the description.

“It’s a special year, achieving a lifelong dream of playing in the NHL,” he said over the summer. “Then you kind of want to be with the rest of the pack. I don’t want every time I score a goal to be a big deal because I’m the youngest kid or whatever. It’s just having that behind you and getting to move forward. I feel I learned a lot last year.”

Bedard’s first year was exhilarating and exhausting, unique and useful, hopeful and humbling. So what can the hockey world expect in his second year? To see the future, it helps to start in the past.

Think of the first time you walked into the building for a new job. You don’t know how security works. You’re not sure which elevator bank goes to your floor (whatever floor that is, because you don’t know that, either). You don’t know where to fill up your water bottle, where to get a snack, where the restroom is. There are easy answers to all of those questions, but they occupy your mind all the same, and the uncertainty drains your social battery.

Eventually, you get to know that the vending machine on the second floor tends to spit out quarters and the printer in the far corner is the only one that doesn’t smudge the ink. You get comfortable. You get calm. And you get more productive.

The same goes for hockey players, who have 32 different offices.

“You can’t underestimate getting a feel for the league in that first year,” Crosby said. “Getting to know different buildings, all of that stuff. It makes a huge difference.”

“You’re just more comfortable right from day one,” McDavid said. “You know what to expect. You know the guys in the room. You know the staff. You know everybody. You know the city. You’re just a lot more comfortable. I certainly felt that way.”

Everything is new to a rookie. But second-year pros know a good restaurant by the hotel in Denver. They know which linesmen slam the puck to the ice and which ones drop it properly. They know that Miro Heiskanen can seemingly cover half the rink in three strides, and to be prepared for it. They know the speed of the game, the severity of the trash talk, the sound of a Jacob Trouba open-ice hit.

The only thing that’s going to surprise Bedard this season is the new rink in Utah, where he’ll open up the campaign on Tuesday. And, hey, Crosby will be in the same boat there in his 20th season.

“There’s just a comfort factor,” Hall said. “Sometimes it’s more about just your settings and surroundings than it is the hockey. The hockey kind of comes easy, and then the travel, the schedule, just being on your own a lot more is just something you get used to. You get used to playing with guys that have full-blown families (and) a lot of interests outside of the rink — as opposed to junior, where everyone is together 24/7. I remember that a lot. And then just feeling a little more comfortable with the speed and the strengths of the players.”

Bedard’s comfort level is evident. He’s goofing off with his buddies and making NFL picks on Instagram, though he admitted the initial audience in the tens of thousands unnerved him briefly. He’s loosening up ever so slightly with the media. His life is normalizing.

Not that he ever looked all that uncomfortable in the spotlight. He’s always seemed a little older, a little more mature, than his age would suggest. Being an object of international fascination at 14 will age a guy. He even lived alone as a rookie, breaking hockey norms. Crosby famously lived with Mario Lemieux as a rookie. Kane lived with then-Blackhawks executive Stan Bowman. Kirby Dach stayed at Brent Seabrook’s house. It’s a leaguewide tradition for teenagers in the NHL. Not Bedard, though. His parents, Melanie and Tom, spent a lot of time at his apartment in a rotation— Bedard estimated that he had a family member staying with him for about 50 percent of the season — but he learned to rely on himself and on teammates, particularly Taylor Raddysh, who lived in the same building.

Fifteen months after the Blackhawks drafted him, Bedard in some ways feels like a savvy veteran.

“I see an already more comfortable guy in the room, just being a pro,” Blackhawks captain Nick Foligno said. “But there’s still a guy that is expecting to learn more and wants to get better. That’s what I really want to see. He’s not like, ‘It’s my second year, I got it all figured out.’ He’s still as hungry as ever. That’s going to bode well for us.”

That’s the key: balancing comfort and competitiveness. The Colorado Avalanche’s Nathan MacKinnon dropped from 63 points in his rookie season to just 38 in his second year and has talked about how difficult his sophomore campaign was and how he briefly might have lost the edge that drove him as a rookie.

Bedard doesn’t see that as an issue.

“I’ve been very motivated since I was 4 or 5 years old,” he said. “I’m not overly concerned about that. Maybe I have a slump, maybe I play really well. You don’t know the future.”

The Blackhawks have surrounded Connor Bedard, right, with more experience and talent in his second year, including free-agent signing Tyler Bertuzzi, left, and Taylor Hall, center, who missed most of last season with an injury. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

You don’t know the future, true, but you know the expectations. McDavid and Crosby are the two most obvious and frequent comparisons to Bedard, even though they are three very different players. In Crosby’s second season, he had 120 points and won the Hart Trophy. In McDavid’s second season, he had 100 points and won the Hart Trophy.

“Going from year one to year two was great! I liked that year,” McDavid said. “Year two was fun.”

Is it fair to expect the same kind of leap from Bedard? Probably not, even with the Blackhawks finally giving him some talent to work with by signing free-agent forwards Tyler Bertuzzi and Teuvo Teräväinen, among others. But Bedard has a goals total and a points total in mind for the upcoming season. He’s not sharing, but you can bet they’re pretty high.

“I mean, yeah, I’m very confident in myself and my abilities,” Bedard said. “Obviously, I’d rather show it than talk about it. But I was thinking going into this summer (that) it’s a big year for me to take the next step in my career. Winning the Hart and the point race is pretty tough, so I’m not focused on that. But just going in and making more of an impact on every game, more consistency, knowing the league a little more. I feel good going into the year and I want to show that, not talk about it.”

The leap requires more than just points, though. Yes, the Blackhawks would love to see Bedard pot 40 goals and post 100 points. But they need to see him become a more well-rounded player, to be less of a defensive liability, to be a positive force in all three zones. Having better teammates surely will help in that regard, but so will knowing the league better, and knowing himself better.

He spent his summer working on his speed and power. And he put himself in game-like scenarios to help him think at a higher level and at a faster rate.

Just being a year older can make a huge difference, too. He’s still growing into his body and filling out his frame. The difference between an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old from a physical standpoint can be massive. Some of his teammates have already noted how much stronger he looks in training camp.

“The difference between the first two years is huge,” Crosby said. “In my case, I just got so much stronger between 18 and 19. You feel different on the ice.”

Blackhawks coach Luke Richardson can see it in Bedard, too. He’s noticed Bedard’s drive, his conditioning level, his effort on the backcheck, his strength on the puck and in the corners. To take that next step, though, Richardson said, Bedard needs to learn about “energy management.” Sometimes, Bedard is a little too amped up, a little too on the offensive, and it costs him at the end of a shift, a period or a game.

That goes for Bedard’s famously long practices, as well. He’ll regularly stay on the ice for up to an hour after a high-energy practice to work on his shot and other skills. Dedication is good. But rest is invaluable. Another lesson to learn.

“We tried last year,” Richardson said. “We took his sticks, and then he flirted with his contract with Sherwood or something by taking someone else’s stick. And then we took the steel out of his skates one day and hid it. And I think we’ll just have to have some fun with it, too. He smiled but he still wanted to find a way to get out there. … I think he’ll realize it. Once he goes through it now and remembers, ‘Oh yeah, last year, that third game in four nights, and travel, that’s a lot.’ Hopefully that experience from last year is going to kick in. (It) just brings more maturity to him as a professional athlete.”

Whether Bedard makes the kind of megastar leap Crosby and McDavid did remains to be seen. But there’s a universal expectation for him to make some kind of a leap. The talent level is too high and too evident.

“I think Connor is the real deal,” Crosby said. “We all knew about the speed and the shot. Those things are obvious. But just watching him play, what impresses me is how he sees the ice, his playmaking. That jumps out at me when I see him play and play against him. He’s special.”

Special, yes. But maybe just a little more normal this time around. Well, as normal as things can be for one of the most famous, revered, scrutinized, idolized, sought-after and questioned people in the hockey world.

“I give him so much credit last year,” Foligno said. “It was nonstop, and he understood it. He understood he had a responsibility of being one of the fresh faces of the league — a phenom. He had an obligation to fulfill for the league, kids and everyone who was cheering him on. I give him a ton of credit for that. But I am excited that maybe it’s going to die a little bit, and he can just play hockey.”

—The Athletic’s Josh Yohe and Daniel Nugent-Bowman contributed to this report.

(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)