Screen Shots: Elias Pettersson, Connor McDavid and World Cup of Hockey
Adam Proteau discusses Elias Pettersson's contract situation with the Vancouver Canucks, Connor McDavid's commitment to the Oilers and the NHL and NHLPA working on an international competition.
Welcome, once again, to Screen Shots – an ongoing THN.com feature in which we tackle a few different hockey topics and break down our analyses in smaller groups of paragraphs. Let’s get to it:
An NHL.com story recently covered Canucks superstar Elias Pettersson's contract situation in Vancouver. From our perspective, the team holds the hammer in negotiations in some regards, as Pettersson will be an RFA next summer. But Pettersson has the ultimate leverage of signing a short-term deal and go on to break the bank with open-market offers once he's UFA-eligible in 2026.
This is not to suggest Pettersson is a lock to leave the Canucks. Vancouver GM Patrik Allvin recognizes how crucial the 24-year-old is to the team’s future. When you have 20 more points than anyone else on your team’s roster, as Pettersson did last season, you’re playing at another level. Trading him would enrage the Canucks’ fan base, and no matter what they would get in return in a trade, Vancouver would be losing the best player in that trade.
At the end of the day, Pettersson is going to be the one who decides his role in Vancouver – or somewhere else. If Allvin’s blueprint for success flourishes, Pettersson will want to stay. If that doesn’t happen, Pettersson could choose to move on. But they’re not close to that crossroads just yet.
This coming season should be fairly straightforward – Pettersson is going to play his heart out, and if he has a terrific impact on the ice, he will tilt the scales in his favor.
The reverberations of Maple Leafs superstar center Auston Matthews’ new contract extension are being felt league-wide today, most notably in Edmonton, where fans ate up the latest thoughts on the future from phenom Connor McDavid.
McDavid isn’t going to hit unrestricted free agency until the summer of 2026 – a virtual eternity by NHL standards.
McDavid says he loves playing Edmonton and feels at home there, but he kicked the can down the line Thursday when talking about his future plans to Sportsnet.
“It’s three years down the road,” McDavid told Mark Spector. “We’ve got to see where our lives are at and kind of go from there. I don’t say that to raise eyebrows or cause panic. It’s just the way that it is…But I love playing in Edmonton. I’m 100 percent committed to winning in Edmonton with this group.”
Ideally, Edmonton brass would love to have McDavid announce he’s eternally devoted to the Oilers, but McDavid was being realistic, as all kinds of things could happen that change his perspective and interest in remaining in northern Alberta. And his comment about loving playing in Edmonton is about as good as it gets.
A positive harbinger of what’s to come is the recent hiring of McDavid’s former agent, Jeff Jackson, as the Oilers’ CEO. of hockey operations. That familiarity can only strengthen McDavid’s bond with the franchise.
That said, the moment Wayne Gretzky was traded from Edmonton to Los Angeles, it became clear that even the best player could be moved under the right circumstances. That could happen to Matthews as well as McDavid, but for now, both megastars are locked up for a good period of time. Oilers fans ought to be thrilled they still have McDavid for the foreseeable future and not give themselves an ulcer worrying about matters beyond anyone’s control.
Finally, news broke Wednesday that the NHL/NHLPA's negotiations for an international competition is continuing. The biggest hurdle is figuring out how to treat Russian players in best-on-best tournaments starting in 2025 and then, in the middle of non-Olympic years, how to stage a World Cup of Hockey beginning in 2026 and continuing every four years after that while dealing with Russia's war with Ukraine and its impact on Russian players.
With the war showing no end, the league and NHLPA must prepare as if it will be continuing three years from now and beyond.
For that reason, we can see the NHL and NHLPA allowing players to play for Russia on a no-named-country, no-flag basis, the way the International Olympic Committee appears to be doing for the 2024 Paris Games. There's just too much money to be made to prevent the league and union from laying down rules that allow Russians to compete. It won’t be an ideal setup, but the reality of the situation outside the hockey bubble isn’t ideal.
The last time the NHL and NHLPA staged a best-on-best tournament was in 2016, when Canada hosted and won the World Cup. And the league hasn’t permitted players to compete in the two most recent Winter Olympics, so there’s a serious void that the NHL and PA need to address and overcome to get the planet’s best players competing for their homeland. International hockey has given fans some amazing memories, and the hockey world needs that again.
If the league and Players’ Association can’t make a new tournament happen for 2025, they should be heavily criticized. But NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly wouldn’t have come out Wednesday and addressed the topic the way he did if he and commissioner Gary Bettman – and the team owners – weren’t reasonably convinced a best-on-best series can be put together in less than the next two years. Mark it in your 2025 calendar – a new elite tournament is on the way.