Analyzing Connor Bedard’s trajectory by the numbers: How impactful could he be?

Connor Bedard’s lighting up the World Junior Championship for Team Canada with 21 points in five games. There’s only so much one can draw from five games and one tournament, but in Bedard’s case, his play is just confirming what the last few years of his career have shown: He has the potential to be a force in the NHL. That’s why he’s projected to go No. 1 in the 2023 draft.

The question is how impactful he can be in his first NHL season, and where he’ll stack up to some of the other greats in recent years — the players who were highly anticipated No. 1 picks and made an instant impact in the NHL. 

Let’s take a closer look. 

There are a few ways to project the potential impact a player like Bedard can bring to the NHL by the numbers. One way is to explore others following a similar path to the center — getting drafted to the NHL from the WHL. That’s where quite a few players developed, including first-round picks. 

The challenge is finding a legitimate match for Bedard who has scored at a rate of 1.83 points per game with the Regina Pats. No other WHL skater has come close to that in the modern era. The highest scoring rate among WHL forwards who were selected in Round 1 of the NHL since 2007-08 belongs to Sven Bärtschi, who certainly didn’t create a path for Bedard to follow. Neither did Brayden Schenn, who scored at a rate of 1.4 points per game in the WHL.

The likes of Mathew Barzal and Leon Draisaitl are closer in caliber to what Bedard’s expected to grow into. But neither one was an immediate impact player at the NHL level, either. Barzal stayed with the Seattle Thunderbirds for two more seasons, while Draisaitl split time between leagues in his first season. A team may be betting on Bedard to hit his stride sooner, though, because players who are drafted No. 1 have both a high ceiling and a quicker path to hitting that impact status. 

Using NHL equivalency (NHLe) with his WHL scoring thanks to The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn, we can project him tallying 72 points in his draft-plus-one year at the NHL level. A more consistent curve could be ahead for Bedard, versus say Draisaitl, who took a few years to hit his peak.

But this is only one way to look at the center’s potential, and a flawed one at that. NHLe isn’t perfect, nor is boxing ourselves into just looking at WHLers. 

That’s why it’s more fitting to break out past Bedard’s background and look to the future — a future that may include a No. 1 selection at the draft. 

Players drafted first vary in background, skill set, and actual trajectory. Some struggle, like Jack Hughes did in his rookie year before hitting superstar status. Alexis Lafrenière, drafted a year later, has yet to hit his stride both because of his individual play and opportunity in New York. 

But other No. 1 picks have set the bar high. Auston Matthews. Nathan MacKinnon. The generational tier of Connor McDavid and, just before the modern era and its expansion of data, Sidney Crosby. That’s the star potential every tanking team is hoping for from Bedard, and it’s possible he can bring that level. 

That projected 72-point rookie season would put him in line with Crosby (72 points) and Matthews (69 points). And his scoring over the next six years would stack up to some of the best No. 1 picks the league’s seen over the last two decades. The challenge, of course, in measuring raw point totals is that some players pictured below suffered shortened seasons, whether it was injury related or because of shutdowns from lockouts and COVID-19. 

Points only tell so much of the story, too. So, it helps to look at a more all-encompassing number that also happens to feature scoring details, with Game Score Value Added. 

Somewhere in between the initial strugglers and immediate impacts is the reality of what a No. 1 pick brings to the table. Across their first seven draft-plus seasons, Luszczyszyn found that a player drafted first should be expected to bring almost 18 wins to a lineup. That number slowly trends down in the early stages of the draft, before plummeting for later picks. 

Viz by Luszczyszyn 

Bedard, using Luszczyszyn’s projection, is expected to be worth 22.6 wins over his first seven draft-plus seasons. That’s more than any other forward picked first, besides McDavid (30.9) and Matthews, who is in the midst of that seventh year and is expected to finish with a collective value of 28.0. Data limitations stop us from measuring Crosby’s first seven seasons, but between draft-plus-three and seven years, the generational center was worth 18 wins. 

The projection of Team Canada’s budding star is also ahead of the seven-year average of all pivots drafted first since 2007. The average value Steven Stamkos, John Tavares, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, MacKinnon and McDavid brought over their first seven draft-plus years was 19.3 wins. Expanding to include Matthews, with a projected per-82 game GSVA while he’s playing in his seventh season, bumps the average up to 20.7. Add in Nico Hischier and Jack Hughes, neither of whom have are at the seven-year mark, and the average dips slightly to 18.1 wins.

Comparing Bedard’s projected trajectory to other WHLers picked in the first round and actual No. 1 picks — including the elite and generational through recent years — obviously paints an incredibly encouraging picture. 

Can he actually match that? Not just becoming NHL-caliber or top-six worthy, but reaching game-changer status?

That’s always the question, since it’s never truly known how a player will adjust to the NHL. Sometimes teams can try to predict it by studying skaters with similar characteristics or backgrounds. Plus there’s the context of the team they’re joining — a team that wins the No. 1 pick generally isn’t very strong and may not have a perfect support system. And there are coaching considerations. Not every bench boss will expose a player to top-six minutes off the bat; some prefer to shelter their top prospects for some time. 

If Bedard were to land in San Jose, will David Quinn have learned anything from his experience with Lafrenière in New York? Will the forward have more support on both ends of the ice than Ryan Nugent-Hopkins did in Edmonton?

Until the worst team wins and picks Bedard early in the 2023 draft, it’s not clear how exactly he’ll perform at this level. But based on his career to this point — even, with a grain of salt, his current dominant streak for Team Canada — there’s legitimate reason to believe he’s going to become an impact player at the NHL, and quickly. From there, it’s a matter of seeing what level he can reach. 

Will he maintain that elite status among tougher competition, where he’s no longer the star of his surroundings? Can his numbers match up to that of the generational centers that came before him in the modern era?

That’s what each tanking team is betting on, and his current run at the world juniors is only proving why so many teams hope he’s their next franchise player. 

Data via Evolving-Hockey, NaturalStatTrick, EliteProspects and Dom Luszczyszyn. This story relies on shot-based metrics; here is a primer on these numbers.

 (Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)