As we approach the trade deadline, we can’t help but wonder if the final fix for Elias Pettersson lies with another team?
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The look on Elias Pettersson’s face said it all on Tuesday morning.
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This is a man in a true battle with his emotions. Sad perhaps. Probably angry.
Either way, I could appreciate the fact that being asked, again, to explain why the past two years have been such a disaster on the ice for him was painful.
After a blip of strong play going into the Olympics, Pettersson seems to be back to the same old struggles. He’s a far cry from the player who dazzled Canucks fans for the first six years of his time in Vancouver, give or take.
“I’m capable. It’s frustrating. I haven’t been playing well for some time now, so, yeah, I’m just trying to be me out there every game,” he said Tuesday in a quiet one-on-one interview in the corner of the Canucks’ dressing room at Rogers Arena on Tuesday. His team had lost, badly, again, the night before to the Dallas Stars.
It’s obvious how much this is all paining him. He doesn’t like being a talking point — and yet he can’t avoid it.
Two years ago this week, he signed his current contract, which runs for another six years, averaging $11.6 million per season. That deal carries a mountain of expectation, which he knows very well he hasn’t met.
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Since signing that deal, he’s played 136 games. He’s put up just 94 points. That’s 139th in the NHL in that time.
In the 136 games before he signed his current contract, he put 171 points. That was seventh in the NHL over that stretch. He was a glorious player. He got fans on their feet. Fans chanted his name in admiration. There was a buzz around him.
The switch is dumbfounding, one that Pettersson has been asked about before and on Tuesday. He said he still has no answer. It’s incredibly difficult, he acknowledged.
“It’s not fun, but I can only dictate and focus on my future,” he said.
That future, though, is a little unclear beyond a boilerplate answer. And just from this exchange, I got the sense there’s a lot churning on the inside.
What is that future, I asked.
“I want to do everything to help the team win, be a good teammate, play for a team, play for the crest,” he replied.
“Trust me, I’m just trying to find my game every game. I haven’t been my best for some time. Trust me, no one wants that more than me.”
And it was there were our conversation ended. He got up and left. The emotion was raw. The next question was going to be if he’s talking to the right people, but given how tense he’d felt at the end, it’s understandable that he didn’t want to linger.
He’s as lost for answers as we all are. Fans come to me and ask what’s changed; I don’t have the answers and he clearly doesn’t, though he’s been looking for one. Those around him see the struggles he’s gone through.
The team has disintegrated around him. Two years ago he was on top of the world. An All-Star, a key player on a team that looked like it was going somewhere.
And now that’s all gone. This is a team in a rebuild, a different place that a team that was banking towards contention.
People that watch him see a guy who still has it inside of him. But is he focusing his playing energies in the right place? It’s great that he’s throwing hits and blocking shots and doing all these things that show up on the score sheet, but he used to be the guy who carried the puck up the ice, who set his teammates up for scoring chances, who had one of the hardest shots in the league.
Surely he can find all that again. But it’s hard to see him finding that here. A fresh start, with a new team, in a new role, maybe that’s what he needs. That was another question left unasked. He probably wouldn’t have answered.
In the end, what did I gather from our chat? This guy cares. His struggles are eating him up. He knows very well what people are paying to see, what they want to see — and what he’s not giving them.
Set the salary aside, just think about the hockey. We watch hockey because we want to see athletes at their best. But sometimes we forget the athletes in the middle feel all that too. He was excellence, he felt it.
Obviously he’s feeling its absence. We can’t help him find that, only he can, but we can hope he does because it will better for those of who watch him, but most of all for him, the human.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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