Report: Elias Pettersson asked Canucks early this week to talk contract, believed to be 8 years and $12+ million annually

“This is a massive development for the Vancouver Canucks over the last 48 to 72 hours. There was so much talk, and rumour, and innuendo, so much idle speculation in a very combustible Vancouver market, and understandably so given that, more or less, the centrepiece, the face of their franchise, remained unsigned and was staring down what would potentially be a really fascinating summer for one of the teams at the very top of the standings and is certainly in the race for the President’s Trophy. So the development, which I reported on Wednesday, is the Canucks and Pettersson’s camp have made significant progress on what is believed to be an eight-year deal. I don’t want to speculate on the total dollars just yet, but I think it’s fair to say it’s certainly approaching $100 million total.

“This is absolutely massive for the Canucks, cannot say more as to what this means to this team, and to be able to get something like that done…If they can get it across the finish line in the next couple of days, that would give them potentially six, seven days before the deadline to really lock in their numbers and have a great idea of what their cap picture looks like moving forward that they can potentially even add someone with term when it comes to the deadline… I think it starts with a 12. I don’t know it’s $12.5, $12.25, $12.75 — either way, it’s going to be significant.

“I think what’s way more fascinating is eventually getting the details on how all this came together, because there was a report on Saturday that teams were calling the Canucks trying to gauge interest, and that just blew things up in Vancouver to the point where I’m told Pettersson went to the Canucks early this week and said ‘let’s end all this nonsense. I want to get a deal done. I want to stay in Vancouver.'”