A 19-year-old setting the bar
Nine points in twelve games. That was Anton Frondell’s introduction to the NHL last spring, and it was enough to convince him the Chicago Blackhawks are closer than the standings suggest.
“My goal for this season is to help the team make the playoffs,” the Swedish centre told NHL.com in a Q&A published Thursday, speaking from Munich after attending the European Player Media Tour last month. “That’s maybe the first step in our development plan because we’ve missed the playoffs the past couple of years.”
Chicago has not qualified since 2020. Frondell, the third pick in the 2025 draft, walks into his first full season with the youngest roster in the league around him: Connor Bedard at 21, Frank Nazar at 22, Artyom Levshunov at 20, with Bowen Byram and Alex Vlasic both 25.
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Filling in for Bedard, briefly
The complication is Bedard. The 2023 first overall pick had surgery on his left shoulder in July and is not expected back until November. Frondell is among the candidates to take the top-line centre spot until then, and he is not pretending to enjoy the vacancy.
“He’s the most important piece on the team, and now he’s injured, so it’s not fun,” Frondell said. “I haven’t thought like, ‘Oh, this is good for me.’”
He also knows where the work sits. Frondell won 30.2 percent of his faceoffs across those twelve games, a number he spent the summer trying to repair after shifting from the wing to the middle. Chicago played him on the flank for three games before moving him to centre for the final nine.
Kane, and a rink that shrank
Patrick Kane’s return on a two-year, 16 million dollar contract signed in July gave the room something it had been missing. Frondell grew up watching him win Cups.
“He’s that childhood kind of hero you watched growing up,” he said. “Just skating with him would be like a dream.”
What caught the teenager out was physical rather than sentimental. Swedish rinks are wider. “In the NHL, everything was tighter. You had less time when you had the puck,” he said. Byram’s arrival from Buffalo in June and Kane’s signature have at least put a floor under a rebuild that has spent six years waiting.
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