Connor Bedard is Chicago's best player: By a lot

 

Your team is not very good if you earn the top pick in the NHL draft. Even with the lottery for the top pick, the eligible teams, even if they are the worst in the league, are pretty bad. The Blackhawks were, indeed, bad last year. Now they have Connor Bedard to show for it, and they are the second worst team in the league. San Jose is mired in a 12 game losing streak, and they only have five fewer points than Chicago. 

Now Bedard is going to be out for a couple of months, and it is hard to see where the Blackhawks go from here. At the beginning of the season, Chicago started with a couple of good veterans in Tyler Hall and Andreas Athanasiou. The Blackhawks looked to be improving, especially if their young core,  centered by Bedard, clicked.

Hall and Athanasiou have played a combined 21 games, and haven't really impressed, while the only players with more than half a point per game, aside from Bedard, are Philip Kurashev and Jason Dickinson. Facilitators and goal scorers alike, even when on a line with Bedard, aren't contributing. Bedard is averaging nearly a point a game all by himself.

That means there isn't really an easy fix coming around the corner. Kurashev, in particular, looks like a block they can use with Bedard to build on. They have some good young defensemen as well, especially Alex Vlasic and hopefully Kevin Korchinski, but that's 4 players on the roster. They have some extra picks early in the next few drafts, but outside of Dickinson, there isn't a lot of tradeable commodity to improve their lot. 

Athanasiou and Hall will be back next year, assuming nothing changes, and Seth Jones will be healthy, but as it stands right now, they will have fifty-two million in cap space. The Blackhawks may not have the youth to build around Bedard. There is not Jonathan Toews to go with Patrick Kane for Bedard, at least not right now. Even if they draft well, the new young players will take time to NHL caliber, which means their peak might come too late to incentivize Bedard into sticking around.

 They could certainly afford to go out and buy the roster, however. Now, the real trick will be convincing the Wirtz Family into throwing that money around.