At this point, we’re a good six months away from the 2027 NHL Trade Deadline. But there’s another deadline coming this year, and it’s coming before the season, or even the preseason, begins.

September 15, 2026 marks the date at which the newest CBA changes the maximum term limits of contracts. Prior to that date, a player re-signing with their team can sign for up to eight years. Afterward, it’s a maximum of seven years. (The term limit for players signing with new teams goes from seven to six on the same date.)

This is a new kind of deadline, but it should already be familiar to Vancouver Canucks fans. It got a lot of talk back when extending Quinn Hughes was still theoretically on the table. And since Hughes was traded, much of that talk has shifted to the biggest piece of his trade return, Zeev Buium. The merits of signing Buium to an eight-year extension while the Canucks still can has been debated all offseason, and will continue to be until he either signs or September 15 comes to pass. (Update: Buium did indeed sign an eight-year extension shortly after this article was written! One down…more to come?)

But is Buium the only player the Canucks should be looking to hand a max-term extension to while eight-year contracts are still an option? Or are there others?

Anyone who is entering the final year of their contract – and is not on a one-year contract – is currently eligible for an extension. On the Canucks, that means pending UFAs like Filip Chytil, Drew O’Connor, and Brendan Gallagher, as well as pending RFAs like Liam Öhgren, Aatu Räty, Jonathan Lekkerimäki, and the younger Elias Pettersson.

And it’s the last player on that list we’re here to extol the virtues of extending for as long as possible today.

We realize that handing eight-year contract extensions to players named Elias Pettersson hasn’t exactly worked out for the Canucks thus far. But the second Pettersson is a vastly different player than the first, and a lengthy contract for him would take a very different shape than the $11.6 million AAV nightmare his predecessor signed.

The younger Pettersson is still in the earliest stages of his career. He’s got 98 NHL games and 13 points under his belt; he averaged 13:40 in ice time last year, and he’ll be 22 until February. The season prior, he spent more time in the AHL than in the NHL.

Which all means that, at this stage, it’s tough to say what kind of player Pettersson will be at the end of it all. He’s shown some genuine top-four potential at times, but some are unsure if he’ll ever reach that on a truly consistent basis.

With his profile and path so far, he seems like a rock-solid bet to at least carve out a lengthy career for himself on a bottom pairing. It’s becoming anything more than a bottom-pairing talent that remains in question at this point.

But that question shouldn’t necessarily stop the Canucks from signing Pettersson to a long-term extension all the same.

This Pettersson plays the kind of game that has what we’d call a high floor. He’s got some natural attributes, namely his size and skating ability, that really never go out of style in a defensive player.

If Pettersson can take even one or two steps further forward in his development, he’s the kind of player that NHL teams are pretty much constantly looking to add to their playoff rosters. He’s big, he can skate, he’s physical and downright mean at times, and he is on his way to becoming a penalty killer.

And that floor gives Pettersson a sort of inherent value that is unlikely to disappear, contract extension or no. Even if he doesn’t progress in quite the way the Canucks would like him to, a player like Pettersson is pretty much always going to have some interest around the league, for the simple reason that there aren’t too many other players out there with his combination of size and skill.

For evidence of this, just take a look at the contract that former Canuck Vincent Desharnais signed as a free agent this season. Now, Desharnais is a player who has never risen above bottom-pairing status, and at times has struggled to consistently put down even that level of performance. And yet, he just signed a four-year, $4.2 million AAV contract as a UFA with the Washington Capitals.

Why? Because Desharnais is big and mean and can still play at least a little bit on a nightly basis. That’s really all it takes sometimes, especially in a league that has been trending bigger and meaner of late.

And at this point in his career, with all due respect to Desharnais, how many steps forward does Pettersson really need to take to hit that same level? Not that many.

That should give the Canucks some security in extending Pettersson. Even if he never progresses much beyond his current station, he should remain valuable in that bottom-pairing role. Even if the Canucks decide he’s not a long-term fit for the rebuild, moving his contract to another team should be easy enough. The market for these kinds of players is a constant one.

(For more evidence of that market, look at the return current Canuck Luke Schenn got at the most recent deadline, despite no longer even being an every-night defender.)

If we were talking major salary here, that might be different. Obviously, the other Pettersson’s contract has gotten to the point where it might have some negative value. But the nice thing about the kind of value a player like this Pettersson has is that it’s a value that doesn’t always translate to dollars.

Points are always the thing that correlate closest to salary, and Pettersson will never be a big point-scorer. Were the Canucks to extend him now, one would have to expect it to be at a salary somewhere in that $4 million to $5 million range that Desharnais signed at, and that’s quickly becoming an average-to-below-average salary for an NHL defender.

Get Pettersson signed to something like that for as long as possible now – even for as long as eight years – and it’s hard to imagine him ever dipping below positive value. Make an investment similar to the one the Pittsburgh Penguins just made in Ville Koivunen (eight years at $4 million off 14 career points), and it’d be hard not to see the Canucks as having made the better bet of the two.

In saying all this, we’re not attempting to place a cap on Pettersson’s potential. There is still a chance he ends up a top-four talent at the end of all this. Look at the progress he made in just half a season in Abbotsford with Manny Malhotra, and then consider the possibilities with Malhotra now his NHL coach.

That’s the upside of signing Pettersson to a lengthy extension right now. If he progresses into that rare, top-four defender with bite, such a contract becomes an immense surplus value, and gives the rebuild a serious long-term boost.

But that uncertain upside is not the main attraction here. It’s the seemingly limited downside, especially in this world of endless NHL salary inflation. Signing someone who plays the game and comes with the natural abilities of a Pettersson is what they might call a low-risk, high-reward sort of bet, and that’s the exact sort of bet the Canucks should be making right now.

A more certain upside here is that if the Canucks sign Pettersson to a truly long-term extension now, they don’t need to go looking for another player like him further down the road into the rebuild. They’ll already have a fairly unique asset locked up.

The Canucks signed Buium to an eight-year extension in an attempt to get ahead of his enormous potential. Now they should sign Pettersson to an eight-year extension, if possible, too, because he doesn’t necessarily need to even hit his potential to make his next deal a good one.