Connor Bedard scored his third goal of the 2025-26 NHL season but it wasn’t enough for the Chicago Blackhawks to win their third straight game. Instead, the Hawks fell 3-1 to the Los Angeles Kings at United Center. After the game, Bedard voiced a sincere, yet surprising comment on the team in the City of Angels.

Bedard found the back of the net against the Kings—snapping his five-game goal drought in the NHL campaign. It wasn’t a pretty tally, whatsoever, but it was enough to get past goaltender Anton Forsberg and put the Blackhawks up 1-0 in the first period.

However, that was as many celebrations Chicago would have during their night game with Los Angeles in the Windy City. From the second period onwards, the Kings took control of the game, walking away with a 3-1 victory. Based on his postgame comment, it’s safe to say Bedard isn’t a fan of the Kings’ playstyle.

“[The LA Kings] play really boring. It’s not like a dig or anything. They sit back a lot and make it hard to get zone entries,” Bedard said postgame per Chicago Sun-Times’ Ben Pope and NHL.com. “We started off the game pretty well. Our power play was terrible… and they used that [momentum]. And then in the second we were trying to do too much sometimes maybe. They fed off that, and we couldn’t obviously get it back in the third.”

The coach agrees to an extent

While Jeff Blashill didn’t go as far as Bedard did in his emotion-filled statement, the Blackhawks head coach did share some thoughts with the 20-year-old star in Chicago. Though the loss is a tough pill to swallow, at least the locker room in Chi-city seems to be in agreement as to what caused them the game.

“I thought we played really good in the first and probably could’ve ben up by two goals,” Blashill noted per the Chicago Tribune. “We self-inflicted a little bit in the second period, in terms of puck management and we made the game less direct. It was less predictable to ourselves.”

Albeit with a more professional tone, Blashill’s message after the game mirrored Bedard’s. Either the two practiced their lines before addressing the media, or the Blackhawks hashed it out in the locker room and saw eye to eye on what went wrong against the Kings. The latter seems the more realistic scenario. Now, Chicago must turn words into action, as the Blackhawks gear up to host the Ottawa Senators next.