Connor Bedard took the hockey world by storm in his rookie NHL season for the Chicago Blackhawks. That led to a craze for his hockey cards, but there's more to the perfect storm.

Connor Bedard had an admirable rookie season, scoring 61 points in 68 games and playing top-line minutes as an 18-year-old center on a sad-sack Chicago Blackhawks team. But what was really amazing this year was the demand for his hockey cards, particularly Bedard’s Young Guns rookie card.

While past NHL freshmen may have had more productive rookie seasons than Bedard, none can claim that their rookie card sold for $1,000 the day it was released. 

“His performance this season, the city he’s playing in and being from Canada really helped Bedard exceed all expectations in terms of collectability for his trading cards,” said Paul Zickler, the director of sports brands at Upper Deck.

Every decade or so, a generational talent comes along and turns hockey-card collecting on its head – from Eric Lindros in 1990 to Sidney Crosby in 2005 to Connor McDavid in 2015. And then came Bedard in 2023, the perfect storm for hockey collectors: a young, generational talent from Canada, drafted first overall, playing for an Original Six team in the third-largest market in the U.S. – and in a post-pandemic society.

“The base of collectors is significantly larger now than it was in 2015, when McDavid’s rookie card came out,” said Ryan Greene, the director of communications and social media for Collectors, the parent company of PSA Grading. 

“Many people got into cards for the first time or back into cards during the COVID-19 pandemic. With that came a lot of people getting into it for the speculating and investing angle of it. There’s a bigger level of hype every time one of those ‘generational athletes’ comes along. Obviously, Bedard checks that box for hockey.”

When the Blackhawks drafted Bedard first overall in June 2023, it drew more people into collecting, and they were eager to get his cards. However, due to licensing rules from the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association, Bedard could not be pictured in a Blackhawks uniform until he played in a regular-season game in October. 

But that didn’t stop his earlier cards – showing him with WHL Regina or the Canadian national junior team – from being hot sellers. 

“Bedard was definitely in demand,” said Frank Caputo, co-owner of AU Sports, a trading-card store in the Chicago suburbs. “We had a bunch of his CHL cards from last year. Those sold, no problem, for $40 or $50.”

Despite the licensing rules, Upper Deck found a few creative ways to get Bedard into its early-season products. 

When the company released its 2023-24 MVP Hockey set in August 2023, it put a redemption card in packs that could be exchanged for a card of the “2023 NHL Draft No. 1 Pick” later that season, once Bedard made his NHL debut. The redemption card, found once in every 1,250 packs, quickly shot up to around $500 on eBay.

When 2023-24 Upper Deck Series One was released in mid-October, lucky collectors found an unannounced card of Bedard in a Hawks jersey from the NHL draft. Upper Deck received permission from the league to include the card even though Bedard hadn’t played an NHL game prior to the set’s production. The card was found in one of every 288 packs. Immediately, it was selling for around $700, just two weeks into Bedard’s rookie season.

Later that month, Upper Deck offered two different cards of Bedard as a part of its online-exclusive Game Dated Moments set. The cards were sold via the company’s ePack website for $6 and limited to 1,199 copies each. 

When the first Bedard card went up for sale, ePack crashed, as customers flooded the site, and the card sold out in less than 10 minutes. Thirty minutes later, the second card went online and sold out in about six minutes. That’s an average of 10 Bedard cards sold every three seconds. 

“Unfortunately, when you’re talking about that many users and that kind of frenzy on ePack, there are instances where cards do sell out really quick,” Zickler said.

But what collectors really wanted, though, was Bedard’s Young Guns rookie card, which would not be released until Upper Deck Series Two came out in March.

“Once Upper Deck made it known that Bedard’s Young Guns card, which is the signature rookie card of any top young hockey prospect, was going to be in Series Two, the hype for that product went through the roof,” Greene said.

These are two excerpts from Sal Barry's feature in The Hockey News' recent Champions 2024 edition, in which Barry wrote about Connor Bedard's massive impact on the memorabilia industry.

Adam Proteau discusses more about Bedard's rise in the NHL:

To read the full article and get complete access to thousands more stories from The Hockey News, you can subscribe to the magazine at THN.com/Free. Your subscription includes full access to more than 76 years of articles at The Hockey News Archive.