CHICAGO — We can, and surely will, debate for weeks whether Team Canada general manager Doug Armstrong was right to leave Connor Bedard off his Olympic roster. And if Canada fails to win a gold medal, we might just debate it for years. After all, roster-projection parlor games are almost as much fun as the hockey games when it comes to the NHL’s involvement in the Olympics.

Could Bedard have cracked Canada’s top six, supplanting maybe Sam Reinhart or Mitch Marner on the wing of Connor McDavid or Nathan MacKinnon? And if not, does it make sense to have him in a so-called bottom-six role ahead of a lockdown center such as Anthony Cirelli or a bruising disruptor such as Tom Wilson? Does Brayden Point’s spectacular body of work over the past three seasons trump Bedard’s far better 2025-26 campaign? And would we even be having this conversation if Bedard hadn’t jammed his shoulder in a last-second faceoff against the St. Louis Blues on Dec. 12?

Assuming Bedard doesn’t get the call as a late injury replacement in the next few weeks, we can always sit here and wonder. Chicago Blackhawks coach Jeff Blashill is obviously biased, but he made clear his stance on the debate after Thursday’s morning skate, about 24 hours after Armstrong announced his team.

“The one thing I would say is I don’t think the rest of the league knows how good of a two-way, winning hockey player Connor has become,” Blashill said. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s based on previous years. But I don’t think they have a full understanding of how good a winning hockey player he is today.”

He’s right, of course. The quantum leap Bedard has taken this season is more than just scoring more goals, creating more of his own offense, running a more dangerous power play. Those who have watched him night in and night out have seen the way he’s diving into corners and digging out pucks, the way he’s winning puck battles all over the ice, the way he’s backchecking with the same kind of aggression he has always shown in the offensive zone. All the things everyone says Macklin Celebrini is — correctly, mind you — apply to Bedard this season, too. They have almost identical expected-goals shares (both right around 45 percent). As an 18-year-old, Bedard was pilloried for having a minus-44 rating. Celebrini’s minus-31 was conveniently ignored for the sake of The Narrative. The truth is they were good players on putrid teams, and plus-minus is a poor indicator of an individual’s true performance.

From a per-60 standpoint, Celebrini has a small but significant enough edge in scoring chances and expected goals against to be called the better two-way player, but the idea that Celebrini is Patrice Bergeron and Bedard is late-stage Alex Ovechkin is apocryphal at best, laughable at worst. Both are brilliant talents. And both are fully engaged defensively.

Celebrini is on Team Canada, as he should be. Bedard is not, but he should be.

Blashill is a big analytics guy, worshipping at the altar of scoring chances, but he brings with that curiosity a healthy skepticism that the dynamism of hockey requires. Especially when it comes to quantifying defense.

“I’ve read some things about defensive metrics and things like that,” Blashill said. “I would tell you, I have studied those things tons. I’ve never seen a defensive metric that I trust to say to me whether or not a guy’s a good defensive player. I don’t think they judge what they’re supposed to judge yet. I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re all working to try to get there; we’re not there.

“The metric that I trust is your impact on winning. And the reason why I know he’s a big-time, winning hockey player — when he was in our lineup, we were 1 point out of the wild card. And since then, we’re 1-6-1. That’s the impact he had. That’s the type of two-way player. You don’t have that impact if you’re just a point-getter. You have that impact if you’re a true two-way winning player, and that’s what he’s become.”

Which brings us to, quite frankly, a far more interesting parlor game than Olympic roster debates.

Is Bedard the most valuable player in the National Hockey League? Not the best, certainly not yet. But the most important to his team?

Oh, he won’t win the Hart Trophy. Especially now that he’s missing time with the shoulder injury. MacKinnon has been running away with the MVP this season, and understandably so. He’s extraordinary and affects the game in so many ways. But he also has Cale Makar. He has Martin Necas. He has Brock Nelson and Artturi Lehkonen and Devon Toews.

McDavid has Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard and Zach Hyman. Jason Robertson has Mikko Rantanen, Wyatt Johnston, Miro Heiskanen and Jake Oettinger. Even Celebrini has Will Smith. Bedard merely has the weight of an entire Original Six franchise on his shoulders.

Bedard has spent the season with rookie Ryan Greene, a projected third-line center who never scored 20 goals in the USHL or college, and André Burakovsky, a talented journeyman who spiked a couple of 20-goal seasons with the mighty Colorado Avalanche. Bedard played most of his games with five defensemen between the ages of 20 and 24. And yet he was producing at the same rate as Celebrini and MacKinnon. A higher rate than McDavid or Draisaitl. And as Blashill said, when he was hurt, the Blackhawks were 1 point behind Celebrini’s San Jose Sharks for the second wild-card spot. They spent most of Bedard’s 31 games in a playoff position.

Immediately following Bedard’s injury — and even before Frank Nazar’s — the Blackhawks looked like a completely different team: Slower. More hesitant. More cautious. Lifeless. About as dangerous as a baby-proofed coffee table. Entering Thursday’s game against the Dallas Stars, Chicago had 16 goals in eight games without Bedard, after averaging nearly three goals a game with him.

Go beyond the box score, too, beyond the traditional measures of a player’s “value.” Bedard is the Blackhawks. On Bedard’s first day of training camp as a freshly turned 18-year-old rookie, the Blackhawks rolled a kiosk into the main hall of their practice facility. It sold jerseys and hoodies and shirseys. Every single one of them had a 98 on it. Bedard was instantly the face of the franchise, part of nearly every social media post and ad campaign. He’s been the voice of the franchise, conducting interviews with local and national reporters on a near-daily basis. And even though he’s hurt right now, his spectacular start to the season is by far the biggest reason the Blackhawks have been selling around 19,000 tickets a game throughout December and now into January, including Thursday’s 4-3 victory over the Stars.

The arrival of Nazar, with his high-octane style and personality, alleviated some of the pressure on and off the ice, but they’re still the Chicago Bedards. Help is on the way, perhaps as soon as next year, as more elite prospects rise through the ranks, so he may indeed find his Makar, his Draisaitl. But it’s not here yet. As a recently (and deservedly) promoted alternate captain and team-first player, he’d absolutely bristle at the very suggestion, but Bedard is still largely a solo act. At the very worst, he was Taylor Hall in 2017-18, miles ahead of any of his teammates in scoring and singlehandedly willing them into the playoff picture. At the very best, he’s in the same conversation as MacKinnon, as McDavid and, yes, as Celebrini.

Add all that up, and it’s not a stretch to say Bedard is more important to his team and franchise than any player in the NHL. It’s why there was so much consternation in Chicago the last two seasons, as the teenager looked merely very good rather than generationally great. And it’s why there’s so much excitement in Chicago now.

If Bedard doesn’t get to go to Milan, it’ll be a shame. He earned the opportunity the only way he could: with his performance on the ice. But there will be Olympics in Bedard’s future. And likely Hart trophies, as well. Heck, if not for that fateful faceoff in St. Louis, we might be having that conversation right now instead.

Bedard’s unparalleled value is self-evident, especially in his absence. Nothing Armstrong does or thinks can change that.

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Artyom Levshunov had perhaps his best game as a pro Tuesday against the New York Islanders, showing off the dynamic offensive creativity that made him the No. 2 pick in the 2024 NHL Draft. But he hit the post twice and was still sitting on one NHL goal entering the Dallas game.

“Six posts (this season),” he said before the game. “Feels like more. I have to shoot more shots, and then I’ll get more goals. Has to go in eventually, right?”

Right. Levshunov scored a power-play goal midway through the first period on a wrist shot from the high slot, and the Blackhawks went on to beat the Stars. New dad Ilya Mikheyev scored twice, and Teuvo Teräväinen added a power-play goal. With Bedard out, the Blackhawks have desperately needed goals from unlikely sources — Levshunov had just the one, and Mikheyev had scored in only one other game since Nov. 5 (he had two against the Ottawa Senators on Dec. 20).

It was their second win over Dallas — the league’s second-best team — in one week. They haven’t beaten anybody else since Dec. 10. Dallas was coming off a home game a night earlier, but it was certainly Chicago’s best effort since the Bedard injury.

“Outside of (two late goals by Dallas), I thought we were really good the majority of the night,” Blashill said. “I loved the speed at which we played. I loved how connected we were. I loved our third period. We’ve been in those spots a few times this year, where it’s a tough back-to-back for them and we let teams off the hook, and we didn’t tonight.”