The Athletic’s Mark Lazerus spoke with Red Wings forward Patrick Kane in order to compare the start of Kane’s career to current Chicago Blackhawks phenom Connor Bedard:
Patrick Kane laughed at my premise, but not my point.
My premise was that Connor Bedard could have an identical career to Kane’s — three Stanley Cups, a Calder Trophy, a Hart Trophy, a Conn Smythe Trophy, an obvious first-ballot Hall of Famer — and there still would be some mouth-breathers in the hockey world insisting he didn’t quite live up to the hype, that he was a disappointment, that he wasn’t (here comes that word) generational.
“Who’s saying that?” Kane said with a laugh.
OK, so maybe I’m online a tad more often than he is. But my point was that the hype surrounding Bedard was so hyperbolic, so ludicrous, so unmatchable, that he’d have to be Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux or Sidney Crosby to live up to it.
That, Kane could agree with.
“It’s different with social media,” Kane said. “When I was younger, I got to be somewhat of a regular guy, you know, because people weren’t tracking every single thing that you did throughout your day, right? He’s going to be noticed. He’s probably bothered everywhere he goes. You feel for the younger kids coming in these days, because they get more hype and more attention when they’re younger. That’s just how it is, but is that necessarily a good thing?”
Continued (paywall)
