How much did Elias Pettersson troll some media in Ottawa?

Elias Pettersson is something else.

While dazzling us on the ice on a nightly basis, his personality seems to be coming out and it’s been a fascinating thing to watch.

Following his hat trick last week, as the Canucks beat the Ottawa Senators in overtime, Pettersson was the centre of a media scrum that had a few of the Ontario scribes asking him about his dream of playing for the Vancouver Canucks. According to Jason Botchford (who was there) for The Athletic, some of those Ontario media members were shocked to hear that EP had always dreamed of playing for Vancouver.

When they wouldn’t accept this, EP told them about the Vancouver T-Shirt that he had when he was five and that they should “google it” to see it.

Well, they did:

It immediately stuck out to me as being odd and not for the reason that a hockey player told media members to google something but more because of a conversation from a few weeks ago.

On December 16th, Pettersson was a guest on the After Hours program with Louie Debrusk and Scott Oake, and the t-shirt in question was brought up by a question from twitter:

Based on his replies and demeanour, it’s fair to believe that his response was genuine and that he didn’t know where that shirt came from.

With that being said, he did mention that he would speak to his parents and see if they know. But suggesting that he spoke to them, they told him that he was a Vancouver fan and him agreeing with it seems a bit of a stretch. If you are a kid, you have your favourite teams and players and you remember who they are. It’s more likely that he just had a touristy shirt from Vancouver.

Which leads us to wonder, did Pettersson just remember that moment on After Hours, know that the photo was out there, and thus make it something to deflect what was going on. I mean, I had a ‘wait a minute’ moment as soon as I read about it, it’s fair to assume that Pettersson would’ve remembered it as it happened just a few short weeks before.

Or maybe the Canucks star was a big fan of the team in his youth and he just used this opportunity to have some fun.

No matter what, it’s clear that Elias only has so much patience for the silly questions and will do things that set expectations going forward. The regulars within the Vancouver media have quickly realized this and have adjusted their path accordingly. But there have been some interesting exchanges here and across the league that shows that EP isn’t afraid to send some people on chases or give a death stare from time to time.