At the recent world championships for under-18s and under-20s, Czech hockey players were troubled by Connor Bedard. Now taking over the baton is his distant relative Gavin McKenna, who has been performing similarly fantastic feats so far and could be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NHL draft.
Before the representative peak of the season in the form of the Senior World Championships in Prague and Ostrava, fans have one more appetizer. World Championship under 18 in Finland.
The Czechs, armed with, for example, productive forwards Adam Benák and Adam Jech, will enter the tournament on Thursday with the ambition of winning their first medal since the silver medal in 2014. Last year they already finished in the quarterfinals, losing the fight for bronze the year before.
They will face Switzerland, Canada, Sweden and Kazakhstan in a group of five, of which four advance.
Friday’s opponent, Canada, will not show the strongest possible team this time, either, because the 18-team World Championship intersects with the Canadian junior women’s playoffs.
The biggest jewel, however, will not be missing from the oceanic superpower. 16-year-old striker McKenna will be introduced.
Although he has been known in his native country for a long time, he has not yet been under the international scrutiny. He jumped “only” at the World Hockey Challenge, the unofficial world championship of seventeen-year-olds, where thanks to the record of 5+3 in seven races, he entered the All Star team of the tournament.
Now he will play his first event under the banner of the international federation IIHF. And great things are expected.
In many ways, McKenna resembles Bedard, a rising NHL superstar who will light up the upcoming adult championship in the Czech Republic.
McKenna scored 97 points (34+63) in 61 games for the Medicine Hat Tigers in the past regular season of the elite junior WHL, putting him just three points behind Bedard at a similar age.
The slight difference is that McKenna didn’t celebrate his 16th birthday until this year, while Bedard started his 100-point show as a 16-year-old.
“This shouldn’t happen normally. Gavin has an impact on us as an 18-year-old boy, but he doesn’t have that much,” Tigers coach Willie Desjardins, who once led Dallas, Vancouver and Los Angeles in the NHL, shook his head.
In the overall WHL scoring, McKenna finished twelfth ahead of the best Czech in the competition, Ondřej Becher, who has passed his 20th birthday and at the turn of the year significantly helped the 20-year-old to bronze from the world championship.
Among hockey players of the same age, the Canadian had no competition.
“Unbelievable playmaker, tremendous speed,” wrote Steven Ellis, who specializes in young talent on the Daily Faceoff website. “At the World Hockey Challenge, we saw how dynamic a player he is. He went to power plays, takedowns, he was at everything. There are a lot of similarities between him and Bedard.”
You can even say that they are distant relatives through the marriage of two members of their families.
McKenna now has some catching up to do. Bedard collected an incredible 52 points (26+26) from 25 duels at the U18 and U20 World Championships.
In six matches against the Czech Republic, he came up empty twice, but otherwise always scored at least once. He scored the most in the Czech Republic at the under-18 championship three years ago, where he scored 2+3 to lead a 10:3 quarterfinal rout.
Tags: Canada brings superweapon World Cup Bedard young Bohemia challenged relative
-
