People Are Freaking Out About Elias Pettersson And They Shouldn’t Be

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If you’ve been paying attention to the Canucks recently, you may have noticed there has been some discourse on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) about whether or not Elias Pettersson is in the top tier of players in the NHL. The reason being that his new contract makes him paid like he is as he is now going to be the fifth highest-paid player in the NHL. With that definitely comes some pressure and I feel like that pressure has gotten to Pettersson a little bit. But I’m not concerned about that at all. However, it seems some Canucks fans are.

Many fans have recently been making the argument that Pettersson is not on the level of McDavid, or Mackinnon, or Matthews, or basically any top player in the league you can think of. And when you look at Pettersson’s play lately, it hasn’t been all that great so maybe there’s some merit to those claims.

But there isn’t. I’m sorry there just isn’t and that’s a ridiculous thing to think. Elias Pettersson at his best is a top-ten player in the league and he still has another gear to hit. He’s only 25 years old and is just STARTING his prime.

But I get it. His play hasn’t been great as of late and Canucks fans are concerned if he has what it takes to be the top guy of a team. The problem I have with that argument though is that Pettersson doesn’t have nearly as good of linemates as some of the other players in the league do. McDavid is a cyborg so he can play with anyone, but even then, he wouldn’t be as good without Leon Draisaitl. Nathan Mackinnon has Mikko Rantanen and Valeri Nichushkin to play with. Auston Matthews has Mitch Marner or William Nylander to play with. Nikita Kucherov has Brayden Point. Need I go on?

All these players have great linemates to play with whereas Pettersson has been playing a long list of players such as Ilya Mikheyev, Pius Suter, Nils Höglander, and Sam Lafferty. Höglander is a solid player but he is still getting his footing in the league. The rest are good, but not top-six calibre players. Pettersson needs better linemates to help create for him because defences have figured out that when they’re against his line, if they neutralize Pettersson then they’ll be fine and that makes his job so much harder.

So basically the reason I wrote this is because people need to stop worrying about Pettersson so much and the team really needs to go out and get him some good linemates. Pettersson is great and you know he’s great, so just enjoy him because he’s only going to get better, especially when he gets better linemates.

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