The machine is working.

You can see it in the way the scouts lean over the railing in Medicine Hat, clutching their iPads like holy relics. They aren't looking for a kid playing a game. They’re looking for a return on investment. And after last night, Gavin McKenna looks like the kind of blue-chip stock that makes grown men in expensive parkas lose their minds.

McKenna just dismantled a defense with the cold, calculated efficiency of a software update. He didn’t just score; he solved the opposing team. Five points. In one game. At an age where most kids are still trying to figure out how to clear their browser history before their parents get home.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Western Hockey League, here’s the gist: McKenna is the latest iteration of the Connor Bedard firmware. He’s Bedard’s cousin, actually. Genetics is the ultimate proprietary hardware. You can’t teach the way he finds space. You can’t coach the way he manipulates the puck like it’s tethered to his blade by a Bluetooth connection that never drops. It’s slick. It’s fast. It’s deeply unnerving for anyone who believes sports should be about grit and "want-it-more" platitudes.

The scouts aren’t looking for grit anymore. They want data. They want high-end processing speeds. They want a player who can execute a 2-on-1 rush with the latency of a fiber-optic cable. McKenna provides that. He’s a walking algorithm for offensive production.

But there’s a friction here that nobody likes to talk about. The cost of entry for this kind of "miracle" is getting absurd. To build a Gavin McKenna, you need more than talent. You need the $1,200 custom skates. You need the $500 carbon-fiber sticks that snap like dry twigs if you lean on them wrong. You need the private power-skating coaches who charge $200 an hour to tell a teenager how to move his hips.

Hockey is becoming a closed ecosystem. It’s the Apple of sports—expensive, sleek, and increasingly impossible for the average person to repair or enter. We’re watching a kid who has been optimized since he was in middle school. The "performance scouts won't forget" isn't a fluke. It’s the result of a massive, multi-year R&D project.

The NHL is desperate for this. The league is a clunky legacy platform trying to stay relevant in a world of short-form content and gambling apps. They need stars who can do things that look good in a ten-second vertical video. McKenna is built for that. He plays the game at 4K resolution while everyone else is stuck in 720p.

Last night, he didn't just play hockey. He performed a stress test on the very idea of amateur competition. He made the defenders—actual high-level prospects themselves—look like NPCs in a tutorial level. He’s sixteen, and he’s already overqualified for his job.

So, the scouts will keep scribbling in their notebooks. They’ll talk about his "vision" and his "ceiling." They’ll use words like "generational" because they’ve forgotten how to describe something without hyperbole. They’re convinced they’ve found the next big thing. And they’re probably right. McKenna is a marvel of modern engineering.

But as I watched him glide off the ice, looking less like a jubilant kid and more like a technician who just finished a shift, I couldn't help but wonder about the trade-off. We’ve turned the scouting process into a relentless search for the perfect product. We’ve stripped away the noise and the messiness until all that’s left is a series of highlights and a draft projection.

It’s impressive. It’s efficient. It’s exactly what the market demands.

I just wonder if anyone checked to see if the kid is having any fun, or if that’s just another metric we’ve decided doesn't matter as long as the points keep rolling in.