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<\/a><\/p>\nOh dear.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve got any real shot in the NHL Playoffs.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
According to Frank Seravalli, the Bruins have checked in on this player.<\/p>\n
Elias Pettersson is generally supposed to be Sweden\u2019s big wunderkind player right now. Should be, anyway. He should\u2019ve shown up with an \u201cA\u201d 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 \u201coh they\u2019re gonna medal and it\u2019s gonna be a short game.\u201d Still might be, too.<\/p>\n
Pettersson is by all accounts an extremely high skill forward, able to do a little bit of everything; he\u2019s got incredible hands, he\u2019s a damn strong skater, he\u2019s 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\u2019t need to; he can make something happen.<\/p>\n
All of this can be yours\u2026assuming the team around him isn\u2019t actively self-injecting poison into itself in a desperate attempt to make their insane owner or alternate captain or general manager or fanbase happy.<\/p>\n
Which unfortunately for Mr. Pettersson, is where the problem starts, and why he is reportedly available.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s hoping to be a reasonably deep run in the Olympics, its a far cry from his 100 point \u201822-\u201823 season and his 89 point \u201823-\u201824, and trying to replicate those two seasons has been an active nightmare for the Canucks. They know he\u2019s good!\u2026they 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.<\/p>\n
Elias Pettersson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The big issue that Pettersson has faced throughout his career is that there\u2019s been some horses#!t going on around him pretty much at all times. Anyone\u2019s game would suffer because of that. Great players have had miserable years thanks to their organization making life difficult. Pettersson\u2019s game has had a lot of that, and as a result he\u2019s had a ton of linemates and a ton of revolving wingers and he\u2019s never really been able to get a good bead on who he should be with coach after coach either loving or despising him. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The other big issue is that the Canucks committed a ton of money to him\u2026and he\u2019s struggled quite a bit to justify that since putting pen to ink, especially recently.<\/p>\n
Oh dear.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n