Despite a lacklustre playoff performance really taking the shine off the whole thing in retrospect, Elias Pettersson had a fine season. An outright good one, in fact.

By most reasonable standards, a year of 34 goals, 55 assists, and 89 points would be called a success. Heck, it was the 16^th-most points in any one season by any one Vancouver Canuck ever.

So why do so many consider it to have been a disappointment?

Primarily because Pettersson is no longer performing against reasonable standards. He’s performing against the personal standards he’s already set early on in his career. Pettersson was disappointing in 2023/24, specifically, because everyone watching him knew darn well he could do better.

Flip it around, however, and it can become an expression of optimism. Pettersson notched 89 points last season, and it’s very apparent that he both could and should be doing more.

How much more? Pettersson’s own career benchmarks came a season ago, in 2022/23, as he notched 39 goals, 63 assists, and 102 points. Few would complain if Pettersson simply returned to that statistical ballpark.
But we believe he can do even better than that.

Last year, our intrepid leader David Quadrelli earned some flowers for predicting that Brock Boeser would finally crack through the 30-goal threshold. Boeser responded with 40 goals.

This year, we’re just cutting right through the middle-digits in predicting that Pettersson not only breaks the 40-goal mark in 2024/25, but sails past it all the way to 50 goals.

It’d be a momentous accomplishment, and not one we predict all that lightly. A 50-goal season would be the fifth-highest in franchise history, and the most by anyone not named Pavel Bure or Alex Mogilny. It’d be the most by a Canuck since Markus Naslund potted 48 in 2002/03. It’s a mark that has only been hit 13 times over the past five NHL seasons.

It’s an exclusive club, and, yes, we still think Pettersson is going to join it.

We’ll get the caveats out of the way first. A 50-goal season is the kind of accomplishment that requires pretty much everything to go right in order for it to happen. Any significant injury or illness essentially scuttles the chances, and such things are impossible to predict.

But that possibility aside, a healthy Pettersson can absolutely do this.

On the one hand, Pettersson has had a bit of an up-and-down history of production. Over the past three years alone, he’s gone from 68 points to 102 and then back down to 89, and that’s having played at least 80 games in each season.

His goal-scoring, however, has been much more consistent. Over the past three seasons, it’s ranged from 32 to 39 to 34, and beyond the totals, the numbers are even more uniform. Pettersson’s goals-per-game have been, since his rookie year, at 0.39, 0.40, 0.38, 0.40, 0.49, and 0.41. The only real anomaly there is 2022/23’s 0.49 and the 39 goals that resulted.

Pettersson’s shooting percentage, something that can fluctuate year-to-year and drastically affect goal-totals, has also been spookily consistent. It started high at 19.4% in his rookie season, but has since ranged through 16.7%, 15.9%, 16.7%, 15.2%, and 16.4%.

It’s almost machine-like.

There are two ways of looking at this. It’d be perfectly reasonable to gaze over these numbers, and reckon that Pettersson is what he is, with what he is being a 0.40 goal-per-game player. No shame in that.

Or, one could take the view that we’re taking in this article, that being that Pettersson has established for himself a real high-bar of a baseline when it comes to goal-scoring, and that any significant step forward in that field immediately brings him into the highest NHL echelons.

AKA, the 50-goal club.

It’s certainly a pace he’s operated at for extended periods before. Most will remember that Pettersson started off 2023/24 at a torrid pace, notching 27 goals in 49 games prior to the All-Star Break. That’s a pace of 45 goals over a full 82-game schedule.

That run was capped off by a January 2024 in which Pettersson scored 14 goals in 13 games.

Here’s the thing. If you asked folks who watch him regularly which was the ‘real’ Elias Pettersson, they’d probably point to the red-hot version. That, again, is part of why people were so disappointed in him last season.

But it should make it all that much easier for him to just get back to it.

A key difference-maker will be a willingness to take more shots. His shot-totals dropped from 257 in 2022/23 to 207 last year, going a long way toward explaining the decline in goals.

An increase in the quality of his linemates will also be an important factor. Many have predicted that prospective linemate Jake DeBrusk is in line for a career-high in goals himself, and that could work in contrast to this prediction. Or, they could work in tangent. Having another high-volume shooter on the ice with him could actually really benefit Pettersson. Last season, it was apparent all too often that opponents had keyed in on Pettersson as the probable shooter on most plays, and were ruthless in eliminating his time and space. Their needing to also pay respect and attention to DeBrusk as a shooter at all times creates slack for Pettersson.

It’s also got to be said that DeBrusk is a quality playmaker in his own right, and excels at using possession to create space for linemates.

Another teammate who will factor in is Quinn Hughes. Last year, Pettersson was on the ice with Hughes for only about 45% of his even-strength ice-time, but Hughes’ presence made a collossal difference. While on the ice together, Pettersson and Hughes experienced 38 5v5 goals for and only 13 against. Without Hughes, Pettersson went 29-34.

Just being out there with Hughes more often would no doubt be worth a bushel of extra goals.

But if Pettersson is really going to hit the 50-goal mark, the primary reason for it won’t be someone else, it’ll be Pettersson himself.

This is fairly unique territory for him. Pettersson has always been a riser, a bit of an underdog. He soared up the rankings in his draft year. He ripped apart the SHL the year after, breaking records and silencing doubts. He outperformed all expectations as an NHL rookie, and it wasn’t long after that before he notched his first 100-point season.

This is really the first point in his hockey life that Pettersson could be considered a let down. And we can’t know for certain, but we have to assume that’s not something he enjoys. We’ve seen this player push himself to get better over an offseason before. We think it’s going to happen again. The contract is undoubtedly a factor now, but Pettersson really seems the type to use such factors to propel himself forward, as opposed to resting on his laurels.

And with so much of the disappointment last year focused on Pettersson’s shooting, we also have to assume that shooting is going to get a surplus of attention in his summer training.

Pettersson is 25 years old. He’ll turn 26 about a month into the season. He’s at the exact age that most NHLers hit their statistical peak, and he’s hitting that age with an abundance of personal motivation. And in a moment where the team around him is clearly on the rise. And at a time in which NHL offence, in general, is skyrocketing.

The table is set for a career year. And we predict that career year will entail 50 goals.

Calling it: the 2024/25 season will be the season of Elias Petters50n.