



How’s this for a stat: When Canucks super-rookie Elias Pettersson is on the ice this season, his team is plus-32.

When he’s off the ice, it’s minus-46.

And that’s just about all you need to know about Pettersson’s MVP case this season. No one expected the Canucks to be any good, but here they are in the thick of the Pacific race halfway through the season. And they’d probably be a lot better off if he hadn’t missed eight-plus games due to injury, because the nights he missed saw the team go 3-5-0— including the game in Montreal last week, in which he only played nine minutes before he was injured — and get outscored more than 2-to-1 (25-12).

And technically, Canucks opponents went 5-0-3 in those games because in all three of those wins, Vancouver failed to win in regulation.

Yes, of course one has to keep in mind that Pettersson’s shooting 28 percent and that isn’t sustainable. And one has to keep in mind that he’s already missed almost 10 percent of the full season’s schedule, so that might factor in as well.

And granted, the Canucks’ underlyings stink, especially since Pettersson’s 57.8 percent CF (????) suggests they won’t keep winning as they have: only enough to keep them juuuuuust on the outside looking in, but Anaheim is collapsing right now.

He’s a transformative talent, sure, but Pettersson is also the kind of player who’s the future of the NHL. He’s fast and a guy who accelerates to near-McDavid speeds in the blink of an eye, but can change speeds at will to keep opponents unbalanced. He’s big-but-not-too-big, though as many non-serious pundits have noted, not so much that he’s an NHL-ready weight yet. His skill is insane, off the charts of what you’d expect, and only 18 months out from his draft date, he’s No. 1 with a bullet in a redraft. Perhaps most important, he thinks the game in ways other guys don’t and, frankly, can’t.

In this week’s 31 Thoughts, Elliotte Friedman also makes the case for Pettersson to enter the MVP conversation (not forcefully enough, I would argue), but later quotes Troy Stecher marvelling at a goal Pettersson made out of nothing because he just sees and understands the game on a different level.

The problem with Pettersson, in his critics’ minds, is that he is perhaps not respectful enough. Would he have eaten a ura nage in October had he not humiliated Mike Matheson by being too skilled? Would he not have avoided the Russian leg sweep by Jesperi Koktaniemi had he not been tangled up with the Habs rookie as they approached the end boards before overpowering him and skating away?

Don Cherry, in a moment of pure, distilled Don Cherryness, said that Pettersson’s most recent injury, which caused him to miss two and a half games so far, was on Pettersson, not the guy who hooked him and took him down a mile from the puck. Because Pettersson was asking for trouble or whatever nonsense Cherry was saying.

To me, a person who wasn’t in third grade at the outbreak of World War II, the moments leading up to that takedown looked an awful lot like the kind of hockey play — two guys jockeying for position near a loose puck — that Cherry would normally praise. But Pettersson, a Swede who simply doesn’t “play the right way” (that is, the way the game was played before the invention of cable internet), somehow went looking for trouble on that play and got it.

Todd Bertuzzi, who really ought to avoid talking about this kind of thing, also said the Canucks needed someone to Protect little Elias from the brainless thugs of the league like…. Matheson and Koktaniemi? It worked out great for McDavid last Sunday, right? Bertuzzi, just before he said he likes that players like Tom Wilson are still in the league, acknowledged Pettersson should get credit for “going to the dirty areas,” so that was a nice concession.

The lead-in to Friedman’s Pettersson nuggets was that his quality of play, and that of McDavid, might cause voters to rethink the way they vote on awards. Maybe a touch optimistic this year, given the state of the PHWA’s voting bloc, but probably headed in that direction.

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