- Anton Frondell is in line to center Chicago’s top line while Connor Bedard is sidelined
- The 19-year-old spent his summer in Sweden studying Aleksander Barkov tape and grinding on faceoffs
- Read below for what Frondell said about the switch and where his Calder odds sit
Chicago’s first-line center to open the season might be a 19-year-old who had never played the position full time until March.
Anton Frondell is the leading candidate to fill the middle of the top line for at least the first month while Connor Bedard works his way back, and Ben Pope of the Chicago Sun-Times reported Sunday that Frondell has spent the entire summer in Sweden getting ready for it. He played the wing exclusively for Djurgardens, so the center audition at the end of last season caught him off guard.
Frondell was asked what the move to the middle actually demands of him.
“You need to know the whole game and how to play the role in the middle. I’m trying to study it, watch a couple players and look deep into faceoffs and how to try to win more.”
The player he watched most is Aleksander Barkov, his childhood idol and about as complete a two-way center as the sport has.
The distance between them at the dot is enormous. Frondell won 30.2 percent of his faceoffs in 12 NHL games. Barkov has sat near 57 percent across his last two healthy seasons.
Size is where the kid thinks he has a path. He is 6-foot-1 and has held at 209 pounds for a full year, which makes him one of the few forwards in Chicago’s prospect group who is already physically finished.
He posted nine points across those 12 games, lining up in the middle for all but three of them, and buried his first NHL goal on March 31. Watch it here:
Most of his gym work went into first-step quickness, a gap he spotted the moment he got to North America. Swedish ice let him coast for a beat. NHL ice does not.
Since last week he has been skating in Djurgardens’ training camp with William Eklund, Victor Eklund and Viggo Bjorck, all three headed to NHL camps of their own next month.
FanDuel has him tied for fourth in Calder Trophy odds. The Blackhawks open Sept. 29 in Vegas, and the guy taking the first draw could be a teenager who learned the job off a laptop in Sweden.
