During his second-ever Blackhawks preseason shift Thursday, Connor Bedard gathered the puck, sliced between two Blues, glided into the offensive zone, deked around a third and wristed a shot on net.
The shot didn’t go in, as the fairytale version of the story would’ve dictated. But the three Blues involved were not random grinders but rather Robert Thomas, Pavel Buchnevich and Jake Neighbours — three legit top-six NHL forwards. And Bedard already seemed, at least on that play, to be thinking the game on a higher level than them.
