All the critique around Bedard seems glued around comparing him to ghosts. That's your problem, not mine. Just never-ending pointless squabbling about what is "generational". So if he doesn't go PPG as a 19 year old but then wins 5 Art Ross Trophies from Age 22 through 29 [not making a prediction fwiw, just more to that "MacKinnon" point], is he "generational" again? Who cares. Has anyone ever actually looked around at the players that are Bedard's contemporaries in terms of being similar in age? Which of them is hitting the ground running and getting 100 points by their second year after being drafted? Perhaps the circumstances around the NHL that made and 18 and 19 year old Patrik Laine score 36 and 44 goals and finish 7th and 2nd in the League aren't identical to the ones right now if we look deeper than just league wide scoring rate. Or maybe Young Laine is just better than Bedard will ever be. Who knows time will tell.
Is there a young Forward that you would take over Bedard on a go-forward longterm basis right now? Can you answer that definitively "Yes" without hemming and hawing with "well maybe Jack Hughes if he counts as young [had 52 points in his first 117 games across two seasons], maybe Michkov, maybe someone random I haven't considered"?
Look a bit deeper, he has a really low shooting % without a muffin shot. That will improve if history for any other player is an indicator. His Primary Assist to Secondary Assist ratio is way out of whack. He is 4th amongst Forwards in Powerplay Primary Assists per 60 on the Powerplay with a minimum amount of powerplay time over last season and start of this season, with an even more out of whack primary to secondary assist ratio (more out of line than the best playmakers in the world like McDavid and Kucherov). That should change as the Hawks presumably get better.
When it's all said and done, he can be compared to players way older than him to see how their careers stacked up. Right now though, I'm not that worried about how someone 8 or 18 years older than him was doing when they were his age. If history is an indicator, they will be less of a factor when Bedard is in his prime ages.