NHL teams are willing to take on big contracts as the salary cap rises rapidly. That should make center Elias Pettersson a trade candidate worth targeting from the Vancouver Canucks.
Maybe the most valuable thing you could have as a rebuilding team in the NHL is a guy with a proven track record as a No. 1 center.
The Vancouver Canucks have the next-best thing.
Elias Pettersson was, once upon a time, a center with that kind of ceiling.
He has a 102-point season under his belt, and he followed it up with 89 the following season. From 2022 to 2024, only nine players in the NHL had more points, and all of them were perennial MVP candidates at the time and, likely, future Hall of Famers, such as Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov, Leon Draisaitl, Auston Matthews, David Pastrnak and Artemi Panarin.
Since then, Pettersson has fallen from grace, posting just 96 points over the last two seasons, and that's despite signing a contract with an $11.6-million cap hit around the time his production started dipping.
What quickly began to look like a bad bet by a Canucks front office whose days were numbered might now be a big ol' gift for the people who took over from them.
That's because Pettersson is, by far, the biggest name easily available on the center market via trade or free agency. And fortunately for the Canucks, as is so often the case, there are several teams that need a center to maintain their status as playoff contenders, or to take a step as an organization.
He would represent a rather expensive reclamation project, but when your other options are Dylan Larkin at an incredibly high price (and who probably doesn't want to play for your team) or Tyson Jost, suddenly, Pettersson looks less like "the guy who's overpaid by $3 million" and more like "the guy who was tied for 50th among centers in points last season."
While 50th doesn't sound great, keep in mind there are 64 top-six centers in the league. If the Philadelphia Flyers were willing to pay $18 million for Leo Carlsson, a player who fits that description (albeit one who's just 21 and certainly had a better year), surely Pettersson at $11.6 million makes sense for someone with a hole in the middle of their top two lines.
That someone could be the Flyers. Or the Montreal Canadiens. Or the St. Louis Blues. Or the Seattle Kraken.
It's a lot of money for a guy who seems to be trending down, but it's also fair to say he was the locus of a toxic situation in Vancouver, and there aren't many players in the league for whom a change-of-scenery trade makes more sense.
Moreover, the acquisition price probably isn't very high if the other team is taking on the full freight.
If Darnell Nurse, another notable cap-dump trade in the Pacific Division this summer, only really fetched the Edmonton Oilers Shakir Mukhamadullin, then Pettersson might be priced similarly: a lower-end youngish NHL player. The big return for the Canucks in such a trade is cap flexibility as they embark on their rebuild.
And for the team taking on Pettersson, they get a guy who's perfectly capable of being a No. 2 center and might be able to return to being a 30ish-goal scorer. He's not even 28 and has been surrounded by a bad work environment and a worse roster for the last two seasons. If a new team can put better players around him (and it wouldn't be hard to do), he's probably worth the risk.
Pettersson might never be that point-a-game guy again, but if you can get him to 60 points or so — which probably wouldn't take a ton of work — as the salary cap hits $120 million or more in 2027-28, you just won't be sweating the last four years of his contract. As we saw with the Carlsson offer sheet, teams are already building that price jump into their long-term planning.
Pettersson is a lot like Nurse in that he has plenty to give, but he was thrust into a too-large role necessitated by a too-big contract. It doesn't mean they're perfect players by any means, but they can be key cogs in successful teams. We've seen it before.
And if things go right on the trade market this summer, we might just see it again.
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