As the Winter Olympics come screaming into focus, the league has experienced a bit of a frenzy of moves to get assets before the great unknown of playing in Milan and/or Cortina potentially leaves them without stars for the last few months of the NHL season. Thanks to the truncated schedule, a bunch of teams are already beginning to make moves after looking at their upcoming schedules, their current records, and their current trends, and making painful decisions on whether or not they’ve got any real shot in the NHL Playoffs.
One such team is the Vancouver Canucks, who have been a never ending cavalcade of Drama, Woe, and Disaster for the better part of half a decade, and at the center of it all is their # 1 Center, who they are finally willing to listen to other teams about offers for.
According to Frank Seravalli, the Bruins have checked in on this player.
On the Surface
Oh boy this is a doozy.
Elias Pettersson is generally supposed to be Sweden’s big wunderkind player right now. Should be, anyway. He should’ve shown up with an “A” at minimum for Tre Kronor at the Olympics and we should all be looking at Sweden with him at the top of his game and going “oh they’re gonna medal and it’s gonna be a short game.” Still might be, too.
And yet!
Pettersson is by all accounts an extremely high skill forward, able to do a little bit of everything; he’s got incredible hands, he’s a damn strong skater, he’s willing to get into the dirty areas of the ice and cause a little havoc that way, his shot can feel like a game-warping moment, and when he is on his horse, he never, ever, ever gives up on a play. Even when he should, but he doesn’t need to; he can make something happen.
All of this can be yours…assuming the team around him isn’t actively self-injecting poison into itself in a desperate attempt to make their insane owner or alternate captain or general manager or fanbase happy.
Which unfortunately for Mr. Pettersson, is where the problem starts, and why he is reportedly available.
Pettersson is like Quinn Hughes, in that he has been part of propping up a Canucks team that was much farther back on their development curve than they believed, and struggled to really find a place for himself in multiple systems, and watched as his impressive point totals slowly fell into hell, and while he is rebounding this year and looks to be on pace for a 60ish point season, which has been around where his floor is, and what’s hoping to be a reasonably deep run in the Olympics, its a far cry from his 100 point ‘22-‘23 season and his 89 point ‘23-‘24, and trying to replicate those two seasons has been an active nightmare for the Canucks. They know he’s good!…they just gotta make JT Miller happy, or change coaches, or keep swapping deck chairs on the Titanic, or go through like six goalies in a month leading into the playoffs.
Elias Pettersson’s career has been a lot of really cool skill plays and solid work as an NHL center buried under a mountain of bulls#!t; some of it from his own team, some of it from slumps he made himself, some of it the natural consequence of a team riding the PDO wagon until it fell out from under them, all of it too much for both parties at this point. Vancouver needs to make major changes and make them fast, and they are reportedly okay with asking about just about anyone, and that does include Pettersson, who would likely fetch another big return after the Quinn Hughes trade.
Under the Hood
Look.
The big issue that Pettersson has faced throughout his career is that there’s been some horses#!t going on around him pretty much at all times. Anyone’s game would suffer because of that. Great players have had miserable years thanks to their organization making life difficult. Pettersson’s game has had a lot of that, and as a result he’s had a ton of linemates and a ton of revolving wingers and he’s never really been able to get a good bead on who he should be with coach after coach either loving or despising him. That’s forced him to play very into his game, very out of it, and it has messed with his analytics. I cannot definitively prove this, but I believe it contributes to the issues he faces.
The other big issue is that the Canucks committed a ton of money to him…and he’s struggled quite a bit to justify that since putting pen to ink, especially recently.
Pettersson has not been playing like a 1C for a very long time, and the Canucks have attached a nice big dead sea bird (of which it is bad luck to kill, Willem Dafoe said so.) to his neck, ensuring that every game where he doesn’t have a point feels worse and worse and piles doubt after doubt after doubt on this player.
And sure, that one viz is gonna maybe make people feel a little concerned, but I need to make it clear that this is a long-standing problem for him; over the last three years, he’s 12th among Canucks skaters in shot attempts and unblocked shot attempts for per 60 minutes, and 11th in expected goals-for per 60 minutes.
Hronek, Hughes, and Tyler actual Myers have better rates of unblocked shots than him. Nils Hoglander, a player the Bruins once checked in on fiercely before joining the NHL and is playing like 12 minutes a night in Vancouver, has objectively better rates of getting the puck up ice than Pettersson.
This does ignore however that, if we are being fair to him and acknowledging that he is also playing on a dogass team full of dog-ass players, he has improved. He is now 4th on the Canucks in expected goals for per 60, and 8th in shot attempts and unblocked shot attempts for. That is…maybe not worth the obscene price tag? But it is decidedly better than he’s been, and a trend in the right direction for him.
And to be mean, 51.09% on the year is a damn sight better than another center on the Boston Bruins who gets similar ice time to Pettersson. It may not be the most efficient use of money…BUT! he would be An Upgrade.
There is also the chance, especially given his skill ceiling and who his linemates would be, that the Bruins, with their world class wingers and culture of Making Players Feel Valued and Want To Give Back and the fabled “Bruins Bump” and all that…that he could in fact resurrect the player he was in his earlier years. This guy is still in here somewhere in theory; if you figure out where he is under what you will be hoping are years of mismanagement by Vancouver.
What would they need to part with?
The Canucks are in shambles. They are by far the worst team in the Pacific Division as well as the Western Conference, and that is stiff competition at the moment. You will be going for one of maybe players who’s getting anything done on the Canucks right now (and one of them is now in San Jose), and it will herald the beginning of a great big long down-to-the-studs rebuild for Vancouver.
That is a first round pick among many to begin with; especially for the Bruins, who will likely find themselves with a half-decent choice in the middle or top 10 of the draft.
That’s Alberts Smits. That’s Adam Novotny, Oscar Hemming, Caleb Malholtra, Ryan Lin that you are giving to the Canucks, which is not including the roster player and one of the vanishingly few prospects of note in the Bruins’ system.
They may not turn into anything! But they might become something, and you gave them that for an asset that they have well and truly spent a lot of time crushing the confidence of and now you gotta rehab and convince the Canucks to retain salary on, because there’s no way in hell they can fit his preposterous contract under their cap right now.
Should they do it?
The Boston Bruins under Don Sweeney are more than willing to gamble if given the opportunity. They have gambled frequently and sometimes it’s even worked.
Even then…This will be a hell of a gamble if they decide they wanna do it.
If the Bruins think they can rehab this player, and commit to making him work for the long haul, even knowing he may cost them one of their extremely first round picks, even knowing that the last guy you were hoping gets a Bruins Bump Did Not Actually Get One because the team isn’t nearly as good as it used to be, even knowing it may end up losing them one of the few in and out excellent players on the year or one of the potential future stars of the team because let me make it clear you are not sending Elias Lindholm back the other way, they need young guys and they need talented guys and the Bruins don’t really have a lot of either, if you are aware your fanbase and certain sections of this market’s media is gonna be on him from day one if he doesn’t show improvement…then I suppose my answer is go for it.
But you need to be sure. You need to be absolutely sure.
Because if you make this choice, you will be locked into it. His contract has an NMC. You may not pay all of it! But you will be paying some of it. And you will be stuck to it like glue.
You wanna make that call in year one of a retool?