At this point of last season, Vancouver Canucks forward Elias Pettersson was flying high. On November 12, 2023, Pettersson had seven goals and 18 assists for 25 points through the first 15 games of last season. This led the National Hockey League. He was one point ahead of New York Rangers forward Artmei Panarin and fellow Canucks JT Miller and Quinn Hughes by two points.

Fast forward to November 12, 2024, and Pettersson has three goals and four assists for seven points through the first 13 games of this season, good for 202nd in the league in points, behind some notable depth players forwards, Frederick Gaudreau, Keegan Kolesar and Cole Koepke, defencemen Niko Mikkola and Ryker Evans. And just to top it all off, Pettersson is one point behind former linemate Andrei Kuzmenko.

During this season, there has been a lot of what he dealt with last year: a revolving door of wingers on his line. Through 13 games this season, Pettersson has played eight or more minutes with six different line combinations, playing over 22 minutes with one line combination – Nils Höglander and Conor Garland. And heading into tonight’s game, that didn’t change as Pettersson centred a line with Garland and Jake DeBrusk – a combo that was only put together for this game against the Oilers.

Although the game didn’t go in the Canucks’ favour, he was probably the best Canuck on the ice that night. He was the only player on the team with multiple points, and when he was on the ice, the Canucks out-chanced the Oilers 9-3. Considering his line drew the Leon Draisaitl line for the majority of this game, that’s very impressive.

Pettersson finished with one goal, one assist, a minus-one rating, two shots on goal, one hit and one block in 19:10 minutes of ice time. Checking in under the hood, he finished with a 58.63% expected goals for percentage (xGF%) and a 75% scoring chance for percentage.

This was far and away his best game to this point of the season. Pettersson was moving his feet, engaged in the play, and looked like the player that earned him his eight-year $92.6 million contract extension. But can he build off this moving forward?

It’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Now, let’s take you through Pettersson’s game with shift-by-shift analysis so you can see the little things he did right in our series, The Tape.

We start on Pettersson’s second shift, which was a long offensive zone shift, with Pettersson showing patience with the puck to find the open man to make the play.

As Noah Juulsen transitions the puck up the ice, Pettersson does some heavy cross-overs and gains speed as Hughes carries the puck up the ice. Hughes enters the zone and sends a weak low shot on Stuart Skinner. With the puck loose behind the net, Pettersson gets around Darnell Nurse, hacks the puck away from Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to retain possession, and skates around the side of the net but has his pass to Höglander blocked.

While the Canucks hold the zone, just watch Pettersson skate. He’s skating hard, moving his feet and finding the open areas to make himself available for a potential play. That’s something we’re used to but haven’t seen up until this point of the season.

This is a clip from the same shift, just as they enter the zone after the previous blocked shot. Pettersson picks up a Höglander quick pass, and this is where he shows his patience. With Connor Brown coming for him, Pettersson avoids the pressure but moves into Adam Henrique. Instead of turning back or firing the puck down the boards like he normally has this season, he waits them out, holding the puck on his stick for nearly four seconds with defenders within a stick’s length of pressure, and fires a pass to Hughes, who has all day to take the open space and fire a high shot on Skinner.

Pettersson isn’t done there.

The rebound off the Hughes shot goes high in the air. Pettersson leaves the point, charges forward and knocks the puck down. With Brown also in the area, Pettersson uses his body to box Brown out of the way and regain possession of the puck while gaining himself more space. Now, with two defenders back on him, he notices he has Höglander and Kiefer Sherwood down low, and he makes the smart play of sending it low for his linemates to cycle.

As a 176-lb forward, Pettersson has shown in years past that he can use his smaller frame to gain an advantage over his opponents. And while we haven’t really seen that this season, him doing it on this play was an encouraging sight.

And on the very next shift, he does much of the same. Pettersson comes over the boards and receives a Hughes outlet pass, sending him and Pius Suter into the offensive zone on a two-on-two. Pettersson makes a great stick move to get a pass around his defender and to Suter. However, that would ricochet back to the point area, where Hughes sends back down low to Pettersson.

As he skates with the puck through Gretzky’s office, a defender is quickly on him. Pettersson gives him one of his patented reverse hits, stumbles over, but makes an athletic play to kick the puck up in his feet and up to his stick. With another Oilers defender on him, Pettersson finds Filip Hronek at the point. Continuing to move his feet with urgency, Pettersson goes straight for the middle of the ice to become a threat and isn’t afraid to take the contact that comes with being in that area of the ice.

I really like Pettersson’s defensive effort here. He’s coming hot off the bench, rushing to the opposite side of the ice to inject himself into the play. With the newfound urgency in his strides, Pettersson makes it over there to put a little pressure on Draisaitl. Pettersson does a great job cutting off the angle so Draisaitl couldn’t head to the net with a free chance – because, of course, Tyler Myers and Carson Soucy both took the same guy over the middle and nearly collided.

Draisaitl sends a pass back to Bouchard, and just watch Pettersson; he stops on a dime, spins around, and is immediately right in the way of Bouchard, giving him no space to do anything but hope a pass back to Draisaitl gets through. This is when Bouchard gains an advantage as his momentum sends him forward, but Pettersson gets his stick on it, and Bouchard isn’t able to get the shot off, and Lankinen covers it.

This was yet another play in which he showed up for his team because Pettersson was just simply moving his feet.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably noticed the trend of what we think is the resulting factor for Pettersson’s improved play; it’s that he’s moving his feet and trusting the instincts we all know he has. And that’s what he does on this play.

After a faceoff scrum, the puck pops out, but just out of the reach of Pettersson. The 2024/25 Elias Pettersson before tonight might have just realized he didn’t have a good shot at retaining possession and just glide to the neutral zone and get into defence mode…not that night’s version of Elias Pettersson.

Pettersson gets on his horse and hounds after the puck. While he never fully takes control of the puck, he isn’t afraid to go full speed at a 6’4″, 215-lb Darnell Nurse and get rewarded for that as he gets a stick on the dump in and sends Höglander and DeBrusk on a two-on-one. Höglander makes a nice toe-drag move around the defender and to the slot but can’t bury it. It’s a play that would have resulted in a defensive zone shift instead of a scoring chance off the rush the other way.

After Höglander gave Brown a little shove in the numbers, Pettersson grabbed the puck in the faceoff circle to hold possession. Here is another display of his patience, as instead of ringing it around the boards to the right defenceman – like he has for the majority of the year – he doesn’t panic, turns away from pressure despite knowing his space is shrinking, and sends it back to the left point man.

He then continues to move his feet through the middle of the ice, and all of the Canucks on the ice start to cycle around. DeBrusk moves towards the blueline but passes it back to Pettersson, who now has three options:

A) turn around and have a one-on-one with the Oilers defenceman screening his own goalie.

B) drop pass for Hughes, who’s gaining speed along the boards behind him.

C) fire a cross-ice pass to Hronek, who has an open look with a one-timer with Höglander as a screen in front.

Pettersson elects to send the puck to Hronek on the far side, but by the time he has time to get the puck into a threatening position, he’s now covered. This opened up the perfect opportunity for Pettersson to show Canucks fans that his howitzer of a shot hasn’t gone anywhere. Pettersson rips his hottest shot of the season, clocking in at 93.4 miles per hour (MPH).

How nice is it to see that graphic back on your TV screen?

Now his next shift was when Pettersson tallied his goal when the Canucks needed a spark the most, just 18 seconds after the Oilers scored two in one minute and 13 seconds.

Pettersson receives a between-the-legs back pass from Höglander and decides to just dump it in. After two attempts to clear the zone, Pettersson heads to the net once he sees DeBrusk retrieve the puck, and you know what they say: good things happen when you go to the net. DeBrusk takes a half-clapper that is perfectly timed up with when Pettersson skates in front of the net, and he tips it down perfectly through Skinner’s legs to get the Canucks on the board.

One more time for good measure.

When offensive players start feeling themselves, that confidence really shows. If Pettersson wasn’t playing so well and hadn’t just scored a goal on his previous shift, do you think there’s any shot he’s loading up a shot from this location? With how almost timid it seemed he was to shoot the puck? Regardless, he had a little bit of his swagger back as he accepts the Hughes saucer pass, gets in a threatening shooting position between the blue line and the top of the circle, glides to just before the top of the circle and wires a shot off the crossbar.

Hopefully, this is a sign of what’s to come, as the Canucks are a much better team when Pettersson’s shooting like this.

Like, just look at this movement. Pettersson was not moving like this before.

On the Canucks’ first power play of the game, Pettersson passes it back and forth with Hughes before he swings it to Miller on the opposite side. That’s when the ice opens up for Pettersson, and we see some of the movements we’re talking about. He skates forward to the faceoff dot, where he opens up a cross-ice lane if Miller wants to feed it through. Once Miller drops it back to Hughes, Pettersson retreats with some nice-looking cross-overs while keeping his knees bent so he’s in a shooting position no matter where he is to blast a one-timer.

However, once he receives the pass, he’s no longer in an advantageous shooting position and holds the puck. Showing off his patience, he skates backwards toward the boards to pull in the high penalty-killer, opening up the high slot area for Hughes to rip a one-timer. Unfortunately, the pass was a little behind Hughes’ stick and cleared the zone.

But his movement and instincts in that moment are what we’re used to seeing out of the Swedish star.

Here’s a rare defensive zone shift for Pettersson in this game as he skates on a line with Miller toward the end of the second period. With a loose puck in the corner, Pettersson leaves his point and goes into the gritty area. He uses his body positioning to protect the puck from Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, is strong enough on the puck to avoid the Zach Hyman poke check, spins around and sends the puck right past Nugent-Hopkins and in a safe area for Carson Soucy to grab the puck.

Now the offensive instincts turn on, as Pettersson skates hard to the other side of the ice, uses some excellent hand-eye coordination to deflect the puck out of the zone and spring himself and Miller on a partial two-on-one — great defensive instincts that turned into offensive instincts, and nearly a scoring chance the other way.

We proceed to the third period, where we get what is probably the best defensive play of Pettersson’s season. And it comes at the tail end of a nearly two-minute shift on the penalty kill against Connor McDavid.

At the start of the clip, you can see Pettersson visibly fatigued, staring up at the clock to see he’s been out there for a minute and a half. He double-shoulder checks to make sure nobody’s behind him, reads Draisaitl’s eyes, and sees he wants to make a backdoor pass to McDavid with an open net. Pettersson swings his stick back and pokes the puck out of danger into the corner. Unfortunately, Pettersson is too tired to make a strong clearing attempt. But it’s a great display of him reading the play in the defensive zone when he’s dead tired.

Here’s a replay of the play with a better angle.

However, his night did have one blemish, and it came 48 minutes into the game. Now, this wasn’t necessarily even Pettersson’s fault. Noah Juulsen goes to make a breakout pass that’s out of Pettersson’s reach and on the stick of Nurse, who makes a touch pass to string to Oilers the other way. Pettersson does what he’s supposed to do by picking up speed to take away the middle of the ice. This one just goes through Lankinen – undoubtedly one he wishes he had back.

While, as mentioned, this goal against wasn’t on Pettersson; however, he does earn a minus-one on it, so we thought we’d still show you.

Another tough clip here, but we won’t dock him too much as every Canucks player blundered in the third period, and this doesn’t paint the entire picture of Pettersson’s game that night. It’s small. He’s playing the F3 (defensive forward) position well; he’s the first man back to retrieve the puck. But he has Höglander on the left boards for an easy breakout pass and elects to try out-waiting his former teammate Vasily Podkolzin. The play resulted in a turnover and some offensive zone time for the Oilers, which, lucky for Pettersson, was not capitalized on.

And this game got ugly pretty fast. One more Edmonton goal brought the score to 7-2, with many fans leaving the game early. However, those who stayed were treated with a late power play.

So, obviously, the games out of reach. But what I enjoyed watching was the sudden fearlessness of this man-advantage. The top unit was more aggressive with their zone entries, passes and shots despite their usual methodical movements to try and find the perfect play.

Here, it was an aggressive bank pass behind the net from Garland to Miller, a few passes between Hughes and Pettersson before Hughes had run out of patience and let one rip despite a defender clearly in his lane. It looks like Pettersson gets his stick on it and it deflects in the air, Nurse bats it out of the way – or so he thinks – perfectly landing on Pettersson’s stick, who uses his vision to find Suter with his stick on the ice and pots his fifth goal of the season.

Was it a perfect game? No. But having Pettersson, the one under the most scrutiny in the market, be the lone bright spot during this game was something encouraging to see, and hopefully, for the Canucks sake, something he can build off of moving forward.

Pettersson will have a chance to do just that against the team he scored his first NHL goal against in his first game and has the most points against (27 points in 27 games), the Calgary Flames, in Rogers Arena tonight. Oh yeah, on his birthday, no-less.