ANAHEIM, Calif. — It’s not as if Leo Carlsson has a Google alert set up for Connor Bedard’s name. Carlsson follows Bedard the same way he follows any other player in the NHL: through social media, highlight clips and news stories.

But when it comes to Bedard, that’s plenty.

“He pops up a lot,” Carlsson said with a chuckle. “He’s easy to follow.”

Carlsson and Bedard forever will be linked by the 2023 NHL Draft, when the Chicago Blackhawks took Bedard first, and the Anaheim Ducks took Carlsson second. And the two of them forever will be linked with San Jose Sharks wunderkind Macklin Celebrini, as all three have taken massive leaps toward megastardom this season. They’re the new Crosby and Ovechkin, the new McDavid and Eichel — only there are three of them.

There’s Bedard, the flashy sniper who can pick any corner from any angle, who thinks nothing of taking shots nobody else would think of. There’s Celebrini, the total package, poised to become as good in his own end as he is in the offensive zone. And there’s Carlsson, the hulking combination of the two, blending size, skill and sound Swedish savvy. Bedard and Carlsson are 20. Celebrini is 19. All three are their team’s No. 1 center. All three entered Sunday’s action in the top 10 of the league scoring charts. All three might be in Milan come February.

That they’re all in the same conference and all on teams with the potential to be long-term contenders for years to come only adds to the excitement.

It’s not hard to envision the Ducks and Blackhawks in particular returning to prominence, if not dominance, around the same time, more than a decade removed from that memorable 2015 Western Conference final, with Carlsson and Bedard at the center of the action.

“It’s an exciting time for the NHL to have three guys at those ages that are so, so good,” Blackhawks coach Jeff Blashill said. “We know we’ve got a special one in Connor, but Leo’s a really, really good player. It’s been fun to watch these few games (against the Ducks). They’ve got a number of good young players, like we do, so it’s kind of a fun matchup to see not only where everybody sits today — both teams want to win now — but also what looks like it might be a good battle as we head into the future.”

The third meeting of the season on Sunday between Carlsson and Bedard wasn’t much of a fight, as the Ducks ran the Blackhawks out of the Honda Center in a thorough 7-1 trouncing, maybe Chicago’s worst performance of the season. Through the first two periods, which included a franchise-record 27-shot second frame, Anaheim led 5-0 in goals, 43-13 in shots on goal, 27-5 in scoring chances and a ludicrous 16-0 in high-danger scoring chances, per Natural Stat Trick.

Carlsson — who had an 88.7 percent expected-goals share in the game — capped off that blitz with a rising wrister that caught Arvid Söderblom (career-high 46 saves) off guard late in the second, then added another tally 15 seconds into the third, knocking in a Chris Kreider centering pass. That gives Carlsson 16 goals on the season.

🚨 Leo 🚨

We got fiiiiivveeee on it! #FlyTogether pic.twitter.com/HOb4BT1UTw

— Anaheim Ducks (@AnaheimDucks) December 8, 2025

Bedard mustered an assist on Tyler Bertuzzi’s power-play goal in the third, which ended a 25-hour span in which Chicago had been outscored 12-0 by the Kings and Ducks.

Chicago won the previous two matchups at the United Center, with Bedard posting two goals and two assists in their most recent meeting, over a week ago. Carlsson mustered just one secondary assist over those two Blackhawks wins. So as one-sided as Sunday’s game was, these two players — and these two teams — figure to spend the next 10 or 15 years trading body blows. The Ducks are about a year or two ahead of the Blackhawks on the rebuild schedule, and the Blackhawks are about a year ahead of the Sharks. Once all three of them really hit their stride, they could be the new axis of power in the West.

For now, more of the focus is on the trio of young stars than the trio of promising teams. Their simultaneous breakouts have been fun to watch, fun to follow, fun to discuss.

It’s certainly been fun for fans to debate. Post a clip of Bedard breaking a defender’s ankles and going top-shelf, and you’ll get a dozen “Celebrini’s better” replies. Post a graphic showing how Celebrini posted his 105th point in his 100th game on Sunday, the sixth-best 100-game total among active players, and you’ll get a bunch of Bedard GIFs in the replies, probably the one of him sticking his tongue out on a drive-by. (And post about either of them, and you’ll get a few forlorn Canucks fans trying to manifest the return of their beloved Vancouver boys into existence.)

Carlsson, a lower-profile player on a lower-profile team, often gets lost in the shuffle. But he’s no less special than the other two, the third pillar on which the NHL will build its next generation of stars. It will no doubt help Carlsson’s cause that he’s on the best of the three teams, as the Ducks look like a genuine playoff club while the Blackhawks and Sharks are trying to defy the doubters and the metrics. First-year coach Joel Quenneville has the Ducks looking like the 2008-09 Blackhawks, poised to become the next big thing, and Carlsson is the best of a whole flock of young talents.

“The perfect team to play on, for sure,” Carlsson said.

If the hockey world is lucky enough for all three players to continue on this trajectory, we’ll get to spend the next decade-plus debating who’s better, who you’d prefer to build a team around, who’s the better scorer, the better defender, the better all-around player.

The players don’t engage in such discourse, of course. Bedard and Celebrini are friends. Carlsson got to know Bedard a little bit on the pre-draft circuit, and he has nothing but respect for Celebrini, whom he’s never met outside of a game situation. Carlsson laughed when asked if he’s comparing himself to Bedard and Celebrini, saying that’s “fun for the fans, but not something I put a lot of thought into.”

That’s just it, though. They know those bar-room debates are part of the fun of being a sports fan. As Bedard put it, the NHL is “entertainment” as much as anything else.

“It’s great for the game, stuff like that,” Bedard said last month. “It just grows the game, people shredding each other about guys they never met or don’t know. At the end of the day, we’re getting paid a lot of money to play a game, and we want fans to enjoy it, and that’s part of it. I think that stuff’s fun. I don’t care, I don’t look at it, but for them, it’s good.”

The Blackhawks’ two worst games of the season were in Buffalo and in Anaheim — both the second night of a back-to-back, the only two back-to-backs Chicago has had this season. Blashill certainly has noticed, but come on, it’s only about a 40-minute bus trip from Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles to Honda Center in Anaheim. This wasn’t exactly a brutal travel weekend.

“Both of them, we were really, really bad,” Blashill said. “Our two worst games of the year were those two back-to-backs, and that’s inexcusable. Neither one of them were that hard of travel. And we’ve got more coming. We have to figure out a way to be better on the back-to-backs.”

The Blackhawks finished the road trip 1-2-1, but in odd fashion. A shootout loss in Vegas and the first game against the Kings were two of the best road games they’ve played all season. To follow it up with 6-0 and 7-1 losses is baffling.

“That’s the ebb and flow of the league,” Blashill said. “(Anaheim) got beat 9-1 a couple games ago, and then they killed us tonight. It’s the ebb and flow of the league, for sure. I’ve seen more of it this year than probably other years. Everybody’s so close that when you’re off your game, it’s a tough night.”

André Burakovsky and Alex Vlasic both projected confidence that the Blackhawks would bounce back for Wednesday’s home game against the New York Rangers, but Blashill acknowledged the team was mentally down on itself as the Anaheim game wore on.

“When you get your butt kicked on the scoreboard two nights in a row like that — and tonight was a total, total whupping — your confidence slips,” he said. “But this is a big-boy league, man. You’ve got to have mental toughness, and you’ve got to find a way to get back at it. … There’s lessons to be learned. The one thing I’ve been impressed with this team is they’ve learned lessons. This is a time where it felt like they didn’t learn a lesson from Buffalo.”