Elias Pettersson is coming into the 2024-25 Vancouver Canucks season with something to prove.
The star forward had a strong first half of last season, including a lights-out January where he scored 14 goals in 13 games. His game fell off in the second half of the season, however, and he struggled to produce in the playoffs. There are a few different reasons why that happened, such as playing with linemates who were just as snakebitten as he was.
A big reason why his game fell off, however, was that he was playing through an injury. Pettersson revealed at the end of last season that he had been "playing with a bad knee since January."
Specifically, Pettersson was dealing with tendinitis, which is an inflammation of the tendons in a joint. This can cause pain, tenderness, and swelling and can worsen over time.
"It's painful, it's aggravating," said commentator Ray Ferraro, who dealt with tendinitis during his NHL career. "It's frustrating because you can take three weeks off and come back and be right in the same spot. You do treatment and you have pretty detailed treatment to the area of inflammation and sometimes it just takes forever to get better. It just does."
"It's like a nagging injury, it doesn't want to go away easily"
Did Pettersson's tendinitis get better over the summer? Well, yes and no.
Pettersson admitted to Sportsnet's Iain MacIntyre that the injury hasn't fully gone away, saying, "I still feel it sometimes." After the first practice at training camp, Pettersson said that it affected his offseason training.
"I had a good summer. It was a little different — I had to train around my knee injury but I feel great," said Pettersson. "It's like a nagging injury, it doesn't want to go away easily, but we figured out a way to work around it."
In other words, the tendinitis is still there for Pettersson but he and the medical staff he worked with have ways of managing it. He did not seem overly worried about the injury or that it would hold him back in any way.
"I don't feel any pain right now or after [practice]," he said. "It's not a big thing."
The Canucks will be hoping that it won't be a big thing during the season. At the very least, the Canucks did good work addressing one of the other causes of his regression last season, going out and signing multiple wingers who could end up on his line.
The most important signing was Jake DeBrusk, who Pettersson skated with on day one of training camp, along with top prospect Jonathan Lekkerimäki. Pettersson is eager to see how the two of them fit together.
"I'm very happy with the signing," said Pettersson. "So far, it's been good stuff with Jake. We'll just keep on building, trying to understand each other, how we play."
With better linemates and a gameplan for managing his tendinitis, Pettersson should, in theory, be able to get back to being an elite franchise forward. That will be fitting as he enters the first year of a long-term contract that pays him like an elite franchise forward.
With that $11.6 million cap hit comes big expectations but that doesn't faze Pettersson. No one can put more pressure on Pettersson than Pettersson himself.
"I'm always my biggest critic," said Pettersson. "I'm never gonna shy away if I play good or bad. It's just accepting that it wasn't my best hockey at the end of the year but it's in the past...I'm always going to put the biggest expectations on myself, so that hasn't changed."
