The 2024/25 season has not been near good enough for the Vancouver Canucks.

So, the 2025/26 Canucks will have to be better.

A situation that, naturally, has led to the majority of current talk, as the team wraps up this disappointing campaign, centring around the ‘how’ of roster improvement. The Canucks will have both cap and roster space with which to fit in any upgrades they can get their hands on. It’s the actually getting their hands on the upgrades that most think will be the problem.

GM Patrik Allvin and Co. will no doubt first attempt to use free agency to improve their team. But there are precious few impact players available this summer, and no guarantee that any of them are interested in signing in Vancouver.

The next route is that of trade. But trades require returns, and the Canucks are also quite short on tradeable assets. There are few, if any, regular roster players who the team would both be willing to give up and who might affect a reasonable trade value. The fans and media alike are also fairly adamant that trading the team’s top prospects – namely, Tom Willander and Jonathan Lekkerimäki – would be a poor decision at this point.

So, all speculation about offseason trades has primarily focused on the Canucks dealing away draft picks and perhaps some of their lesser prospects.

But of late, one prospect has almost certainly transitioned from the ‘lesser’ list to that of the ‘untouchables,’ and that’s the younger Elias Pettersson.

Prior to his arrival in the NHL, you did occasionally hear Pettersson II thrown into Canuck-related trade proposals. If Willander and Lekkerimäki were off the table, and the team wanted to maximize its trade possibilities, it made some sense to throw the next-best prospect out there, and most folks had Pettersson ranked there.

But now that everyone has got an extended eyeful of what he can do at the big league level, no one is talking about trading the young man they call “EP25” anymore. And with good reason.

Pettersson skated in the 23^rd game of his career on Sunday, one day after picking up the first goal of his career on Saturday against the Ducks.

The goals and points are not what’s drawing positive attention. That goal was Pettersson’s third point of the year. But that was to be expected, as this was never a player with a lot of offensive hype. Pettersson is on pace for about 11 or 12 points across a full season, and that’s actually not far off from the most he’s ever scored at any level – the 18 points he got in 2021/22 for Orebro in the under-20 Swedish circuit.

It’s the everything other than the scoring points that has people impressed with the newest Elias Pettersson.

Again, we have to look beyond the surface level stats here to see the greatness. Coach Rick Tocchet isn’t putting the 21-year-old into any situations he can’t handle, and has thus limited him to an average of just 12:22 a night against mostly middle-six competition. All his fancy stats, like Corsi and Expected Goals and High-Danger Chances, are all hovering right around the 50%, break-even mark.

But it’s less about the numbers, and more about how comfortable Pettersson already looks as an NHL player.

Pettersson looks confident handling the puck, and while that may not translate to too many points in the long-term, it will make him more valuable than the average defensive-oriented defender. They say that the best offence is a good defence and vice versa, but the best defence is also just having the puck on your stick, and not your opponents. The more Pettersson is able to hang onto the puck, the better.

He’s managed to get involved physically right away, to the point that he’s already drawn the attention and ire of opponents on multiple occasions. Usually, this is the part of the game that young defenders really have to work themselves up to. But not EP25, he’s a natural.

There was never much talk of Pettersson being a supreme-skating prospect as he was coming up. You didn’t hear much about his wheels being a problem, but they were also rarely listed as an especially strong asset. Well, that appears to have been a mistake. Pettersson can really move out there, as evidenced by what happened a couple weeks ago.

On a random backcheck, Pettersson achieved the fourth-fastest speed recorded by an NHL defender this season, and the 15^th fastest speed, period, at 23.72MPH.

Is there anything this guy can’t do?

Which is not to say that there isn’t plenty Pettersson can still learn. But the key thing here, and the thing that truly makes him an ‘untouchable’ asset already, is that Pettersson looks more than ready to continue doing that learning at the NHL level.

The Canucks made a bold choice in not papering Pettersson down to Abbotsford at the Trade Deadline, which makes him ineligible for the AHL playoffs. Now that the Big Canucks are going to miss the postseason themselves, they might be regretting that choice slightly. But it sent the right message all the same, with that message being that Pettersson had cleanly established himself as an NHL player.

This isn’t an Akito Hirose situation, in which a new prospect hits the scene late in a season during garbage time, where the points don’t matter, and puts on a show. Pettersson will wind up having been with the Canucks for more than a third of the regular season, and he hasn’t come out of the lineup much during that time.

This is a player who, by all indications, is ready for the NHL today, who will still be ready for the NHL tomorrow, and who will continue to be ready for many years to come.

We’ve already talked about the vital, vital importance of the Canucks making the most of next season, all part of the grander scheme of making the most of Quinn Hughes’ prime. Draft picks and younger prospects unfortunately don’t help much in that goal, save as tradeable assets.

But a prospect ready to step in, and stay in, now? That does make a big difference. Having Pettersson working his way up the depth chart while still on his entry-level contract saves cap space, it saves assets that might have otherwise been spent on a veteran defender, and it gives the team some serious internal growth potential. All things that can help them into the future, sure, but more importantly, things that can help them right now. Which, as we’ve pointed out enough times, has to be the focus.

What we’re really saying here is that Pettersson has established himself not just as a better prospect than most gave him credit for, but a far more NHL-ready prospect than anyone might have reasonably expected.

That, more than anything, should take him firmly off the trade market. He’s now far too big a part of ‘the plan.’