In the immortal words of LL Cool J, “Don’t call it a comeback.”

At least, not yet.

But through the early going of the 2026-27 season, it sure looked like a comeback in the making for the senior-most Elias Pettersson. Through seven games, he’s got two goals and six assists for eight points (which should actually be nine points after a seemingly-missed assist on Jake DeBrusk’s goal against New York) and his five-game start matched the hottest of his career. He’s also +2 on a team that has given up a whopping 35 goals against across those seven games. Perhaps most intriguingly, he’s already thrown 26 hits, which is a tie for second in the league behind our old pal Kiefer Sherwood.

More importantly than all that, Pettersson appears more confident, more comfortable, and more engaged than he has been in years out there. He looks to be enjoying playing hockey for the Vancouver Canucks once again.

Pettersson might not be entirely back to his old self, and measures of his skating speed back that notion up. Still, he’s playing easily his best hockey since his halcyon hundred-point days. He’s playing in a way that, for now, perfectly justifies that previously controversial $11.6 million cap hit. And if he were able to keep this up for the entirety of the 2026-27 campaign, at that point, we’d pretty much have to call it a comeback.

Which means it’s a reasonable time to start wondering what such a comeback might mean for the Canucks and, more specifically, for their rebuild.

It’s tempting to think first about trade value. The Canucks and their fanbase have been considering a Pettersson trade for so long now, that it’s only natural. And, on the surface, a Pettersson comeback would seem to make it both easier to trade him and likelier that the potential return for him would be massive.

But there’s another side to the coin here, and it involves Pettersson’s no-movement clause. Unlike some other NMCs on the roster – like Filip Hronek’s, Brock Boeser’s, or Jake DeBrusk’s, which all turn into partial NTCs partway through their terms – Pettersson will maintain his clause throughout the entirety of his contract. That means that, until 2032, Pettersson is entirely in control of his playing destiny.

And even in his darkest days, Pettersson has been consistent in his message of wanting to stay and play in Vancouver. We have to imagine that the kind of success he’s enjoyed lately only makes that more true. And so, in terms of a potential trade, Pettersson’s comeback has a bit of a converse effect. On the one hand, it sure makes it more likely that other teams want him, and would be willing to pay up in order to acquire him. On the other hand, it makes it more likely he’ll stick around in Vancouver and use his NMC to do so, if necessary.

That leads to a question of how a bounced-back Pettersson might contribute to the Canucks’ rebuild as an ongoing roster presence.

Pettersson is 27 now, and will turn 28 in a month. His contract runs through to the 2031-32 season, which he’ll start at 32 and end at 33. It’s this season, plus five more after that.

The Canucks, for their part, would certainly hope to start being more competitive by, at least, the end of the decade. If all goes relatively well, that could reasonably line up their next playoff appearances with the final few years of the Pettersson contract.

There is the potential that Pettersson could prevent the Canucks from finishing at the bottom of the standings over the next couple of seasons, and harm the rebuild in that way. But so far, that doesn’t seem to be an enormous factor. The Canucks are off to a 2-5-0 start, which puts them in third-last in the Pacific Division (but only because the Calgary Flames and Los Angeles Kings have been even worse), sixth-last in the league overall as of this writing, and fifth-last in point percentage. That’s not quite as low as they’d like to be, but there’s still plenty of time to continue trending downward after an exciting start.

The Carolina game was a good example of the possibility that the Canucks could still underperform as a whole even as Pettersson overperforms as a player. He played 15:09 of even-strength ice-time with a positive rating in Corsi, shot control, and chance control, including high-danger chances. He did this while starting most of his shifts in the defensive zone and facing difficult matchups against the defending Cup champs. He posted two assists – very nice assists, at that – and only gave up one goal against, which was shorthanded.

And, despite that sterling performance, the Canucks still fell 7-2.

More of that, and the Canucks should finish in the basement all the same, no matter how well Pettersson performs as an individual. And that probably carries on into at least next year, too.

It’s a couple years down the road where Pettersson’s impact on the rebuild might turn around into the outright positive. We’re anticipating the arrival of several rookies on the team over the next couple of seasons, including several at the forward position. It’s pretty easy to see how having this current version of Pettersson on the roster might be a boon to those rookies.

Pettersson’s wing is currently a pretty nice place for Jonathan Lekkerimäki to occupy, for example. Over the next couple of seasons, that could be Adam Novotny there, or Niklas Aaram-Olsen, or some other wing prospect unmentioned or yet undrafted. Playing with a point-per-game defensively sound centre is a recipe for early success for those wingers, and should aid in the smoothness of their transition to the big leagues and their continued development past that.

Of course, the Canucks’ best forward prospects play the same position as Pettersson, but there are potential boons there, too. Braeden Cootes and Caleb Malhotra are arriving sooner rather than later. For them, Pettersson offers an opportunity to ease into the responsibilities of an NHL centre. He can presumably continue to take the tough matchups and defensive starts until either of the other two are ready for it, all the while continuing to contribute a reasonable amount of offence on top of it all. As Malhotra and Cootes rise up the depth chart, Pettersson can slide down, focusing more on the two-way components of his game. If all goes really well, you’re looking at a 1-2-3 punch at centre of Malhotra, Cootes, and Pettersson by, say, 2030. At which point, we’re no longer talking about future development, but immediate returns. When it comes to competing in the NHL, centre depth is a major part of the picture.

Over time, this approach would probably necessitate some other moves. We’ve already talked plenty about how, in a scenario where Pettersson sticks around, Marco Rossi probably has to make a move to accommodate Malhotra and Cootes at centre. That could be a trade out of town, but it could also be a move to the wing, which is something that coach Manny Malhotra has already experimented with early on in 2026-27.

The kind of hockey Pettersson plays when at his best can benefit his teammates across the board. He sure buys a lot of extra time and space for Zeev Buium, for example, when the two share the ice, and that’s got to be a positive for Buium’s continued development. There’s another sort of converse thing going on here, too, where the more a rejuvenated Pettersson contributes to the development of his younger peers, the better the Canucks become overall, which could hurt their ability to draft the sort of high-value assets they still sorely lack. But there’s definitely a narrow path to be walked in which Pettersson does all this without pushing the Canucks all that far up the standings, and it’s a path that, at the very least, he seems to be walking thus far in 2026-27.

We can’t go too much further past that last point without discussing salary. It might be argued that, in this very early going of 2026-27, Pettersson is actually playing up to his cap hit. But it’ll take a much more sustained effort to say he’s really worth his contract, and then the sustaining of that sustained effort for several years to come. As the Canucks’ younger generation ages into their second contracts, there is a possibility that Pettersson’s $11.6 million starts to get in the way, especially given the size of some second contracts these days. But by getting ahead of the curve on some signings, as the Canucks have attempted to do with Buium, and through the mercy of several more sizeable cap ceiling increases, they should be able to get through it all without feeling too much of a pinch. Again, only so long as Pettersson actually continues to play at a level that justifies him taking up that large a chunk of the available space.

The last question to ponder here, then, is whether Pettersson might still be effective enough to contribute to what we hope are playoff runs circa about 2030-2031ish. And though nothing is certain, up to and including Pettersson maintaining his level of play for even the remainder of this current season, there is plenty of possibility.

Last year’s champions, the Carolina Hurricanes, had plenty of players in their early-to-mid-30s on the roster, including two in scoring roles in Nikolaj Ehlers and Taylor Hall. Last season’s list of the top-ten NHL scorers included Nikita Kucherov and Mark Scheifele, both 33 and thus older than Pettersson will be by the end of his contract.

The NHL is increasingly becoming a young person’s league. But at the same time, advances in conditioning, nutrition, and injury recovery have made it so that certain players can stay effective longer, and that’s more true for the stars than for others.

Pettersson is playing like a star again. Does that mean he’ll have the staying power to still be contributing to the Canucks when their games really start to matter again?

That remains to be seen, and will take a while to know. But the possibility is now on the table, and that’s not really something that could have been said prior to this season.